


Question the Stars

by Lorem_Yipsum



Category: NU'EST
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, M/M, Outer Space, Science Fiction, Superheroes, Yaoi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-01 11:57:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 62
Words: 90,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6518209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorem_Yipsum/pseuds/Lorem_Yipsum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five boys with unique abilities team up to fight evil. Sci-fi/Superpower AU in the style of a saturday morning cartoon with occasional detours into grittier territory.</p><p>Hitting all the checks for good old superhero fiction. With the obligatory beach episode and a sinister villain.<br/>Later on there will be somewhat explicit yaoi, but those chapters will be clearly marked and so will be other squicky things.<br/>There is fighting but no gore.<br/>No major character death even if it may look like it at some point.<br/>May contain plot twists that'll leave you at the edge of your seat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Influx – Almighty Aron

With a mere thought, Aron took out the first crook by smashing him into the ceiling. The burly scumbag fell onto the stack of metal crates that filled most of the room and groaned in pain.

Aron strode further into the dingy lobby and waited for the other thug to react. The most reasonable reaction would have been to run away, but few ever did. Granted, it was unusual for a young, lone, baby-faced boy to storm an arms dealer fortress on his own, but that should have been all the more alarming to the still standing crook.

Nevertheless, the ugly criminal pulled a hand gun and emptied the magazine from two arms lengths away. Aron simply held the bullets in the air by sheer will, picked one out as if plucking a berry and let the rest drop to his feet.

He turned the bullet between his fingers into a gum drop, threw it high into the air, caught it in his mouth and grimaced. Why could he never get the taste of strawberry right?

With the gun now useless, the remaining crook pulled a switch knife from his belt and aimed for Aron’s chest. He succeeded in poking a tiny hole into the fabric, but the blade turned to dust as it impacted on the skin.

“You guys never learn,” Aron said with an eye roll. Why would a knife do what bullets couldn’t? Still, it was understandable. They had obviously never encountered a boy with god-like powers before. He was unique and a secret after all.

Waving his hand for dramatic effect, he lifted the second crook into the air and made him join the first one on the metallic boxes. Lazily, Aron brushed over the container and its material deformed in his hand like soft wax. He pulled on the metal as if it was a sculptor’s clay and wrapped the criminals’ wrists into crude cuffs that fixed them to the crate.

As he walked past them, towards the door deeper into the illegally occupied warehouse, he pressed the red button on the little walkie-talkie he carried on his belt. “Eagle One here. Took out two guys. Lots of boxes in the antechamber but they’re all empty. They must have brought the goodies further in.”

“Well done, Eagle One. Keep going,” came the voice of the FBI agent from the device.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Aron mumbled, already proceeding. There was a five inch thick steel gate in the way, but it melted just fine as Aron heated it to a temperature that made the sun look frosty.

Just a single guy stood in the dim corridor, smoking a cigarette. His eyes were widened in disbelieve as the remains of the steel door smoldered behind Aron. The unwashed delinquent had the presence of mind to draw his useless gun, too – the cigarette falling out of his gaping mouth.

A simple gesture flung the man towards Aron, who stepped aside and let the crook fly out onto the lobby. With precise force, the boy summoned the gun. As it collided with his hand he changed its atomic structure into that of a gun-shaped chocolate bar.

After taking one bite Aron found he had made it too bitter for his liking and turned the rest into sand, letting it slide from his grip. He didn’t spit out the bite in his mouth, though. It was still good enough – not as tricky as strawberry.

Following a short corridor Aron arrived in the main hall where a good dozen huge, scary guys loaded illegally acquired weapons and bombs into a non-descript straight truck.

This was the fun part.

To his side was a heap of junk the criminals had pile up to make room for their operation. He tapped it once and it collapsed into an unbelievable amount of half-molten, excessively sticky marshmallows. That was when they noticed his presence.

Fond of theatrical entrances, Aron took hold of the electricity flowing through the walls and turned it up to eleven. All dozens of laps along the ceiling – and everywhere else in the building – exploded loudly into a shower of sparkles. The only remaining light came from the dust crusted windows, lending an ominous aura to the scene. Quite a bonus.

Multiple buff guys with more tattoos than teeth shouted orders over each other. Within seconds, bullets came Aron’s way which he let rain onto the ground.

Technically he only had to make the area save for the FBI to storm. But he had so little opportunity to flex his muscles – or brain or whatever else caused him to have power over matter and energy – that he couldn’t help but indulge himself. What were the FBI agents going to do? Scold him a little?

The boy walked right into the middle of the gangsters and flung one after another into his marshmallow pile where they helplessly sunk into the squishy goo.

An old man with gold teeth rushed to an open box filled with grenades. If he wasn’t careful he might bring the building down and that was now on Aron’s schedule. The boy closed the box telekinetically and cooled it down to Siberian temperature. As the crook tried to open the box he found his sweaty hand sticking firmly to the icy metal.

Resistance had turned to flight. There were no more bullets coming for Aron to stop. Taking his time, he walked up to the pile of weapons yet to be loaded onto the truck and laid his hand on the crate stack. Dozens of highly dangerous arms turned to pink cotton candy.

Plucking a little treat for himself, Aron wondered if he should hand the situation over to the FBI already.

One of the especially creative criminals tried to vanish through an air duct – a classic. Except this one dragged a bag of ammunition with him and Aron could not allow any dangerous stuff to get lost.

He ignored the shouting around him and casually walked up to the wannabe-escape-artist who had a hard time fitting into the tight ventilation system. With an effortless thought, he pulled the man back out and dragged him along the floor into the marshmallow pile, making sure the bag stayed behind.

Aron smiled a broad, innocent smile that would have been pleasant to look upon for anybody who wasn’t a trapped and soon to be arrested criminal.

“Well, I guess my job here is done.”

Something rattled. The gate at the other end of the hall opened as some men pulled the chain manually, all electronics still fried. The half-loaded truck’s engine started up. Ah, the getaway car, another classic.

Aron waited. Five gangsters had boarded the vehicle which picked up speed slowly. The three who had opened the gate jumped on as the car drove by. The gate fell down shut behind it.

It was a lot more satisfying if they thought they actually had a chance. It was mean, but he had a foible for proper comedic timing.

A brightly shining ball of plasma straight from Aron’s hand blew the garage door to burning bits. He told the fire to go out, just in case it was going to spread to adjacent buildings otherwise. The truck was pretty far away, but there is no distance limit for Newtonian physics.

Aron lifted the truck, his hand up and gesturing for dramatic effect. He couldn’t help it, the act came to him naturally.

First he tore off the axles. Then he ripped open the doors. Letting the car drop onto the asphalt, he forced it back into the hall, making its bottom spray sparks as the metal was dragged along the concrete.

The criminals jumped off the truck as if it was on fire and ran through the containers strewn across the abandoned industrial area – only to meet the FBI agents that had the complex surrounded.

Another successful – and fun – heist.

He had needed that, after having come too late to catch the child traffickers last week.

 

***

 

He rewarded himself by buying real ice cream, not one he magically made out of cardboard or whatever. He could never get the taste and consistence just right anyway.

Technically he was supposed to attend a debriefing, but no one ever reprimanded him for skipping those boring bureaucracy-fests.

As he sat in a small L.A. park on a hill overlooking the neighborhood, he spaced out. Therefore he didn’t notice the other person until he was right in front of him.

The young, slender boy was also Asian but more elegantly dressed than Aron.

He spoke in heavily accented English. “Hi there, I’m Junior. I’m here to take you back to Korea, if that’s alright with you, Aron.”

Thoroughly puzzled, it took Aron a moment to realize what was most disturbing about the encounter. “How do you know my real name? I didn’t even give it to the FBI agen-“

A little too late, he realized that he was giving away more than he should.

Junior smiled brightly. “Don’t worry. I know a lot of things no one else does. I assume you consider yourself unique? With the whole having control over physics and such.”

“Y-yes? What are you getting at? Why do I need to get to Korea? I’m pretty sure I’m doing a lot of good here.”

Without asking, Junior sat down next to him, very close. Was that kid coming onto him?

“I’m with a secret organization,” Junior said. “We want to build a unit out of people like us. Like you and me. We call it N.U.E.S.T.”

“New-what? What does it mean?”

“It means… actually that doesn’t translate very well.”

Aron had been caught off guard by the sudden switch to Korean. He hadn’t spoken that in years. But Junior continued in the foreign language anyway, much more fluently now.

“First I suppose a demonstration. Over there. That man will have his fries stolen by a brave pigeon and drop the rest. In three, two, one. Now.”

The prophesied situation occurred. The man even cursed loudly, for added emphasis. That was a bit amazing, Aron admitted to himself.

“And this little girl will ask her mother for money for ice cream, but get a scolding instead.”

The stern woman turned red with anger at the audacity of her daughter seconds after Junior had predicted the events.

“I’ll demonstrate more later if you wish,” Junior continued, “but nothing too interesting is going to happen here until that tree topples over in a few minutes or so. Here’s my card. Don’t make me wait. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anyone.”

Junior rose and bowed. He spoke his goodbyes quickly and walked off without looking back. Aron kept sitting, dumbfounded.

It was a hot-pink business card stating its owner’s name as Junior. Instead of proper contact information there was a hotel room’s address scribbled on it.

Shady.

Aron memorized the address and got rid of the evidence by turning the paper into minty bubble gum. After the ice cream he could use something to cleanse his palate. He kept sitting on the bench, contemplating, occasionally turning the gum back into uneaten one to refresh the taste.

Four minutes later the park’s most fragile looking tree snapped in the wind and Aron was still there to witness it.

He had goosebumps pretty much continuously from then on and decided the only thing that could calm him down was more ice cream. That Junior guy was legit. But still shady.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know Aron didn’t speak Korean before starting his carrier but I didn’t want there to be a language barrier. One out of five, introduced.


	2. Influx – Ren builds a monster

**Two years ago:**

Ren wasn’t happy.

That was a general state of affairs these days, but still, he would have expected that he’d be at least happy to develop super powers. Usually, something of the sort would be considered amazing.

Ren was the only person in the world who could sense other people’s emotions – from afar. Even with a wall in between. But much more so, he could sense the emotions outside of people. The ones in between them. The general mood of crowds.

Anyway, he wasn’t happy about it. He was a f***ing empath. That was – clearly – the girliest power ever. He had enough trouble with that. Sure, being so hot that some guys kept thinking he _was_ a girl was a big part of his appeal – he’d certainly not dress _down_ for some sleazy men’s heterosexual comfort – but if he had to have a super power he’d rather not get the most feminine one. What use was it anyway?

And he was studying to become a scientist on top of that. Emotions were chemical reactions, why would they even be perceivable as specific concepts outside a person.

Sensing emotion. Really, what nonsense.

 

**One year ago:**

Figuratively speaking, an emotion might take on a material quality. Tension could become so ‘thick’ one could cut it with a knife as they say.

It was supposed to be a metaphor. Ren knew better.

Laying on his bed, he lazily spun the little cloud of Apprehension in his hand. The family downstairs had been through one of their failed family dinners and the teens were sulking in their rooms.

Ren could manifest their apprehension as a viscous… something. He had gotten much better at pressing it into a shape, but it was almost like cloud-watching for the most part.

He had spent quite a bit of time cataloging the feelings he could use to create these little ‘clouds’. It was a nice past time. Still useless, though.

Oh, the neighbors were getting it on again. For the third time that day. Newlyweds. Ren began forming their lust into a vague object. Some emotions were easier to turn into shapes than others.

Something to practice.

 

**Four month ago:**

He had figured out the object part.

Ren could shape emotions, stretching and squashing them. He formed shields, platforms, rods and other very simple things. They were still pretty nebulous, however, and were hardly of more use than any blunt object.

His apartment didn’t give him enough to work with so he visited concerts, football games and whatever other activities he could find. His objects only lasted as long as the emotions.

Ren shaped anything he could get his hands – or mind – on. Pride, willpower, disappointment, you name it.

Exciting stuff. The science-y part of his brain was tickled.

 

**One week ago:**

Nothing had ever gone so horribly _right_. And his bed had paid the price for this success.

Manifesting the emotions people radiated outward was one thing. An easy exercise in shaping emotions by now.

Ren had acted on a hunch when he tried to reach out and manifest deeper feelings. Emotions from within the people in the apartment complex.

It hadn’t turned into an object. It had become a monster.

Maybe he shouldn’t have used the guy upstairs who had been yelling at his TV all evening.

Seeing the shapeless figure turn into a demonic fog-like beast, raving and raging in total silence, had been terrifying. Even though Ren knew he could have dissolved the emotion-construct any time, his instinct had been to jump onto his bed and hide under the pillows, squealing like the girl he wasn’t. Not a dignified reaction but no one had to know.

Only when the monster began to tear apart the mattress did Ren remember that the creature only stayed as long as he wanted it to.

After that, Ren tried different emotions.

There was no doubt, he could create monsters at will.

Real beings with instincts, a goal and perhaps some measure of intellect. They all had their strengths and weaknesses. Constructs made from impatience got all sorts of tasks accomplished with haste, but sacrificed any semblance of care. Those off pride added a lot of showy gestures and motion to their work and stopped as soon as Ren wasn’t paying attention to them. The lust construct had _very_ particular abilities he had no intentions of exploring in detail.

It was uncanny to watch them work in complete silence, but it let him keep his apartment spotless at no expended effort.

  
**Present:**

Ren was pretending to meditate in a park where children played and joggers dashed around. In truth he was practicing to sense emotions of incoherent, random crowds.

A pretty boy dropped down next to Ren and assumed the same vaguely meditative position.

“Hi,” the stranger said.

Ren wasn’t sure if this was an attempt at flirting. The boy sat way to close for a coincidence. Maybe Ren was getting mistaken for a girl again.

“Hey …you.”

“I’m Junior. Go on. Feel my up.”

“What?”

“Check my emotions.”

“Oh, right … _What_!?”

Junior chuckled. As Ren took a moment to assess the stranger’s emotions a few things became clear.

First, Junior was quite infatuated with him. Second, the boy was calm for the most part but looking a little deeper revealed an anxiety like the one before giving a big presentation.

“So,” Junior said, “you make constructs out of other people’s feelings. Fascinating stuff, that.”

“How do you know that?”

“Don’t be alarmed. We’re only here to make you an offer.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“You’ll get to meet the organization in time.” Junior leaned in a bit. “I’m looking for others with powers. You’d fit right in.”

“You’re like me?”

“Yes, we’re the same. Except that I’m completely different. To be less cryptic about it, no, I can’t make …constructs. How do you call them by the way?”

“I dunno? I call them by their specific emotion. Constructed emotions, hrm. Maybe, Conmotes?”

“Good enough for me.”

Ren giggled excitedly to himself. “This is so weird. I didn’t think I’d get to talk about this so openly with someone.”

Junior dropped a card with a phone number in Ren’s lap. The stranger rose and bowed. “Since you’re already aware of what I’m feeling, no doubt, may I just get it over with and ask if you would be interested in dating me?”

“What? No, that’s really creepy.”

Sighing, Junior looked off to the side. “I’m not sure if knowing about the rejection beforehand makes it easier to deal with. In case you’d like to know, there was about a five percent chance you’d say yes. Depends on how I phrase the question. Too bad I can’t know in advance which phrasing works.”

“You’re just getting even creepier now.”

“Meh. I’ll try again when my chances are higher.”

The weird boy from the secret organization apologized, said goodbye and walked away. Ren’s head was spinning. He’d definitely call the number. He only hoped that there were other, perhaps less bizarre people, in that organization.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up is Baekho. There’s gonna be action.


	3. Influx – Baekho who lives in Twilight

Was he protecting the people he loved or destroying them?

He wondered that a lot. It had always been a bad neighborhood, true. But almost everyone really wanted to do better, to get along and – maybe, if they didn’t have anyone left there – get out. And he hadn’t known much different.

The worst thing had always been the drugs. Dealers from outside came into the community and pushed their ‘products’. It destroyed so many families. It claimed so many.

And so, when a little boy had manifested a strange power, he had begun to fight. There were people he wanted to protect. The rest of the world could rot for all he cared.

 

***

 

He called himself ‘Baekho’ – the white tiger. His enemies knew him by that name only.

It was a rare opportunity to fight one of the higher ups – one of the main suppliers. But Baekho had tracked the operation down with many rough interrogations and would not pass up on it.

He wore a ski mask. Black like everything else on his body. He didn’t even have any other colored clothes in his closet.

It was quite amazing that the big guys in the drug business lived in the most expensive districts. The structure before him was something between a mansion and a small office building. A dozen guys in suits were guarding the perimeter. Certainly there were more inside.

Baekho wasn’t afraid. He might die if a bullet hit him but he banked on his ability to stay out of range.

The white tiger _shifted into the_ _other world_.

 

***

 

It had been a terrifying experience when he first stepped into ‘Twi’, as he called it – the world of twilight. It was a perfect copy of the real world. A perfect copy except for the _total absence of people and other lifeforms_. All color was subdued and everything was evenly illuminated by the unceasingly overcast sky. There were no shadows, nothing was truly lit or hidden in darkness. It was always the same, source-less twilight.

Twi was governed by many complex rules but he had learned them over the years.

 **Rule one** : Twi was created anew whenever he entered it. It was as if people ceased the second he shifted. Cars became driverless, huge objects held up by people dropped to the ground and the sound around him echoed from reality for a moment before subduing into an eerie, oppressive silence.

Baekho took a deep breath and strode through the open gate where security guards were standing, back in reality. He only had to get to a convenient hiding place before shifting back.

 **Rule two** : Time passed in both worlds. If he moved in Twi he came out later in the corresponding point in reality. This made it easy to travel to otherwise inaccessible areas.

Having memorized the positions of all guards as far as possible he tried to find a place to come back out - close enough to the building to spot any obstacles he hadn’t been aware of. He had to be fast or the men might have changed their position too much.

 **Rule three** : Everything he took with him into Twi popped back the moment he wasn’t touching it anymore. Similarly anything small enough touched by people stayed back in reality with them. This allowed him to bring some equipment to Twi, but not to camp out there.

He walked behind a huge bush and popped out in reality, surveying his surroundings. He was still unspotted. As there was no way to tell where in the building the master criminal was hiding, he had to stir up a bit of a ruckus. It was sadly unavoidably.

But at least he could get _in_ without notice. The plan was to try the main office – the likeliest candidate for finding the boss, obviously.

 **Rule four** : In Twi he was not bound to gravity unless he wished it. He had to land before popping back, though, or take a fall.

Baekho shifted into Twi and took off, carefully gliding past the foliage, and began to look into window after window. Since he didn’t see the people while in Twi, he’d have to get in before checking if his guess had been correct. If he was wrong he would have to track down the boss by other means.

The back office was a big room with a huge desk and a lot of book shelves. Once he found it, he smashed through the window with his elbow until he could glide in.

Hiding behind the desk so that anyone sitting in the office chair wouldn’t see him immediately, he popped back out.

 **Rule five** : Nothing he did in Twi affected reality. A broken window for example remained untouched and would be whole once he shifted into Twi again. This rule was perhaps the most complicated to work with. It also meant he could never take anything from Twi to reality.

The big boss wasn’t in. But Baekho heard the rustling of at least two men in the room. Looking around the edge of the desk he spotted two suited up henchmen. They were both armed.

Dangerous, but he had to locate the head of the cartel.

Grabbing a paper weight off the desk he shifted to be out of sight and jumped over the desk at the position where he knew the nearest crook to stand.

He popped back out and ran the weight over the clueless man’s head who dropped to the ground with a scream.

Before the other one could pull his gun, Baekho swept an expansive vase off a tiny table and shifted. He threw the vase at where he knew the man to stand and thus let it pop back out. Before popping back himself, he took a few steps to hide behind a leather sofa.

Unfortunately the crook hadn’t been hit too hard and had managed to gather his wits quickly. His gun ready, the man dropped behind the very desk that had been the white tiger’s first hiding place.

Even more unfortunately, the man spotted the boy and opened fire. While this was easily evaded with a shift, Baekho couldn’t let the fire alert the other guards. Once in Twi he lifted off and flew over to where he knew the man to have been last.

They never expected an attack from above and he banked on that a lot. It had worked every time so far.

This time it worked too, thank the powers that be.

Baekho practically popped out on top of the man’s head. The henchman collapsed under the weight of the muscular boy and lost the gun that Baekho kicked away from them.

“Where is the boss?” he shouted at the man while slapping his face. “You better tell if you want to live. Come on. The boss. Where?”

Even though the man was much bigger than Baekho he was clearly panicked and confused. That was enough to make him fear the intruder.

“Right out the door. I swear. He was just in here. Please, I’m just-“

Baekho delivered one big hit right into the guy’s face, not quite knocking him out but leaving him certainly unable to fight back.

Before reaching the door, Baekho shifted again. He used the small table he had gotten the vase from to smash through the door, took a step into the corridor and popped back. Behind him, the real door was still intact, meaning he had left the room without triggering any alarms that were designed to keep people from entering the main office unnoticed. He had learned many lessons in those few years.

 

***

 

Big Boss was a short, old man in a white suit and he was with only one other man. It was clear they had heard the shots as the bodyguard-looking guy was rapidly talking into a device. There were windows in the corridor. That was all the white tiger needed.

He shifted, flew a bit, popped out basically atop the bodyguard and kicked the man in the face in flight. Before he dropped to the floor he shifted again and jumped what would be behind the cartel boss.

The terrified man had no time to turn around as the boy in black seemingly teleported behind him. Baekho grabbed the white suit’s collar and shifted them both. After he lifted the boss, Baekho used him as a weight to smash through the window making the boss scream out in pain and flew them both out and to the ground so fast it must have felt like falling to the kidnapped man.

He dropped his victim into a thicket of decorative bushes and popped out on top of him, basically driving his knees into the man’s stomach.

His gloved hand slapped the bosses mouth shut so he would be unable to yell for the many guards around the building.

“Shut up. If you scream, I’ll kill you. Your choice.”

The man nodded, eyes wide, and Baekho let go.

“Y-you’re the white tiger.”

“Oh, my reputation precedes me. Saves me the introduction.”

“I didn’t believe you were real. I though… I-“

“So do you already know what I want?”

The frightened man rambled quickly. “I’ll stay out of your zone, I promise. I won’t deliver and-“

“Exactly. If I see any one of your boys in my district I’ll come after you. And next time you won’t get to walk away from it. It’s that simple, there’s no reason for you to mess this up. You don’t give me trouble, I don’t give you any.”

He wasn’t willing to turn into a killing machine for his mission. Too many good people he knew were entrenched into the workings of drug dealing and he had no way to tell those who had a choice from those who didn’t. One day, he swore himself, he’d get the scum in the city to stop supplying at all. But for now, all he could hope for was to keep his neighborhood clean.

He punched the big boss one last time for good measure and shifted, taking all the time in the world to fly back home through Twi. Better to make sure there was no way to track him. And of course, flying felt pretty awesome, even in the quiet, eerie world of Twi. Too bad he couldn’t go much faster than jogging speed.

 

***

 

After landing in the tiny back garden of his shabby family home he took off his ski mask, ruffled his hair and popped back.

He found himself face to face with a young boy. The stranger was not the least bit startled at the suddenly appearing person and had exactly the right distance for a conversation.

“Hi, Baekho. What’s up?”

 _The boy had known he’d come here_.

Baekho assessed the situation. The stranger was slender and dressed preppy. He’d go down in one hit, for sure.

But his fist met only air since the stranger had begun to step aside the moment Baekho had wound up the punch. The same thing happened again and again with the stranger evading perfectly and effortlessly, never losing his sly smile. What that kid psychic?

Baekho shifted and took off. He flew to where the boy should still have been and popped. But the stranger had known somehow and turned around.

As soon as Baekho hit the ground he looked into the barrel of a gun. The weird boy was already halfway through pulling the trigger.

The gun was aimed firmly at the white tiger’s face. He would die here.

Except not.

Baekho shifted again and flew out the garden, down the street. Once he was sure he was out of sight of anyone at the house he landed and popped.

The gun was still aimed at him. The stranger had known where to run and arrived seconds after Baekho.

He shot. The white tiger was hit in the face with a small foam nerf dart. It didn’t even hurt.

The thin, weird boy chuckled. “Boom, you’re dead.”

Next he took a little card in hot-pink out of his chest pocket and handed it to the assaulted shooting victim.

“My name’s Junior. If you want to know more than that, meet me.”

There was an address of a café and a time for tomorrow on the card.

Baekho watched the boy walk away as if he had been taking a leisurely stroll. Once he was alone he picked up the dart and tried to wrap his head around what had just happened.

This was even weirder than first stepping into Twi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are there things unclear about the rules of Twi? Please tell me so I can fix them.


	4. Influx – Minhyun’s beautiful mind

Like every night Minhyun got ready to invade a lot of dreams.

He was curled up in a sleeping bag on top of an apartment building in the middle of the city. The sounds and shimmering lights of night time were all around him as he tried to get comfortable.

This was the life he had chosen. Nomadic and unsteady. Not that he had much of a choice. When they had taken the only thing that kept him going forward he didn’t have much of a direction left.

Who ‘ _they’_ were? That was the problem.

He had spent a good year gathering clues. He was successful, but there were too many leads, too many traces to follow. And with the way he gathered his knowledge there was no way to hand it all over to the police.

And so he spent his days wandering around, following lead after lead. Through dreams.

In their unconscious mind, people were open to his requests. He could stay hidden and observe. He could mask himself as someone else from their realm of dreams and pose as whoever he thought was likely to get answers.

Most people wouldn’t even remember him. Dreams are rarely accurately recalled, if at all.

Minhyun began to walk around in the mindscape of dreams as soon as he found his way into slumber.

There were children having nightmares. He dealt with those first, posing as a golden shining samurai to fight off the ghosts. There were adults battling their own demons. He did his best to give them a way out of the labyrinth, a sword to fight or – if their minds had sunken too far into depression - a shimmer of hope.

There were mundane people dreaming mundane stuff. He left those alone. There were sex dreams. He stayed out of those. They tended to become bizarre and more often than not somebodies grandmother was there. Or worse.

He wandered about – through soaring skies, royal halls, dense forests, dinner conversations with long dead parents, libraries and crystal caves. Dreams were interesting but if he stayed for more than a few minutes it became obvious that they made no sense to the observer and he could only get so much of a glimpse.

Where he thought someone might have a lead on his goal, he investigated. This went on for hours.

 

***

 

Back out in the waking world it was probably near morning. More and more people dropped out of the area’s dreamscape. He was himself about ready to wake up in a few minutes.

That night had been a bust. His next lead was two provinces away and he had no bus money left.

“Hey Minhyun.”

He froze in fear. Never ever had anyone even noticed he was there unless he wanted them to. Somebody knowing his name was a whole new level of horror.

Through the gold and silver halls of a mental palace, a boy came along wearing tight but regular clothes. He looked directly at Minhyun.

“Yes Minhyun, I can see you. Don’t be afraid.”

“I… I’m sorry. I’ll leave your dream. I promise you won’t see me again.”

“No, please. Stay. I’m not asleep. I’m in trance. It took me forever to find you like this. Where are you right now? You’ll probably wake up hungry. How about we grab a bite and-“

“No. Sorry, I had no idea there are others like me. But it doesn’t change anything. I have to get going.”

The stranger spoke calmly. “We can help you find her.”

Minhyun froze in place. Did the boy mean “…Sujin?”

“Yes. I don’t know who took your sister away, but there are people who can help you. Give us any information you have and we’ll look into it. So, shall we start over? I’m Junior.”

“I’m Minhyun. But you already knew that.” He bowed respectfully and the other boy reciprocated. “Who are you? You said you’re in trance. Can’t you visit dreams when you sleep?”

“My abilities are different. But there’s something you should try. This mindscape you’re walking through – you’re creating it.”

“What?”

“Dreams aren’t naturally connected like this. If you can learn to do that while you’re awake, you could read minds.”

“I could do… telepathy?”

“I hope so. Give it a shot. So, where are you right now? I’ll bring you something hearty.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally they’re all collected. That’s going to be quite a meeting.


	5. Influx – Junior knows it all

Aron was impressed with how _big_ the place was. Glass and stainless steel were the main materials. Most walls were of a clinical white and the minimalistic furniture was spars. It seemed like a military organization out to impress investors. Except all the color accents were hot-pink.

He had been told that there were multiple phantom companies and legitimate businesses running to ensure the secret organization’s continued, undisturbed, _clandestine_ operation.

A few scientists in white coats and paramilitary personnel in dark uniforms crossed his path, but no one seemed too bothered by the young man walking the corridors of the building at the edge of Seoul that didn’t exist in official records.

This was his first day back in Korea. He knew he was the last to arrive, though the boy named Junior had come by his room to tell him that everybody else was newly arrived as well. And everybody was about to meet for the first time.

 

***

 

The room was likely meant for conferences originally, going by the round table set-up, but on top of that the designers of the place had strewn around a bunch of distractions that young men might like. One wall was all glass, allowing a gorgeous view of the outside.

Aron was the first to arrive – after Junior – and watched the preppy boy’s painfully obvious attempts not to stare longingly at the X-Box in the corner. Good to know this weird Junior guy was still only a regular human boy after all.

After trading polite greetings, Aron sat down on one of the five chairs available. Not the one closest to Junior, but not the one furthest either. Meanwhile Junior himself didn’t sit down at all, only leaning on the table by his chair.

They were soon joined by a buff, muscular guy who introduced himself as Baekho and a tall, handsome boy named Minhyun who seemed excessively polite right of the bat, bowing to everyone on the room individually. They sat down to Aron’s left and right respectively.

The last one was a grumpy – or perhaps evil – looking person who was mind-blowingly pretty and seemed fully aware of it. For a moment Aron had thought the person was a girl. It was the hair that did it. Aron saw Junior swallow hard. The late-comer had no choice but to sit in the chair closest to Junior.

“Alright,” Junior finally started. He was the only one still standing. “I’m the leader of our new little family. Let me get a few things out of the way. You can leave anytime with no consequences. I promise you’re save here and we all are looking forward to- I mean _I’m_ looking forward to working with you. Sorry, I’ve been sort of in an advisory position here for too long. It’s been some time since I wasn’t by far the youngest in a room. So, you’ve all had a tour through the facilities already, right? Do you like your accommodations? …Kay. For starters I want to explain why I called you all here and-“

Baekho raised his hand. “Um, excuse me, but… Can you just tell me what your powers are? If you can read my mind, I’m out.”

Junior chuckled. “I wanted to save the introduction round for later, but if you insist. Everyone in here is unique but we all seem to be part of the same meta-phenomenon. First, there’s Aron who can control kinetic, thermal, photonic and electric energy. He can even create it from nothing.”

Aron rose half and bowed slightly. “Uh, right. And the transmutation thing, too.”

He got three curious stares and Junior’s encouraging hand motion. There wasn’t much in the room to work with so Aron laid his hands on the polished wooden table’s surface and turned it to rubber.

Ren jumped back in surprise. Baekho screeched. Minhyun’s eyes widened but he left his hands on the table, feeling it up.

 

***

 

_“We’ve arranged everything for you to accompany us to Korea right away,” said Junior. They were in an expensive hotel’s lobby, enjoying an expensive coffee on expensive sofas._

_“That’s a bit fast,” Aron said. There wasn’t much keeping him in America, but there wasn’t much he expected to gain from going anywhere else either. “I suppose I’m used to working with secret organizations, but the FBI is at least official business. What you’re proposing-“_

_“They’re getting worried, you know. The agents you work for. They talk about you like you’re an object – a weapon they can deploy. And some think you’re a sociopath with a god-complex. A few have begun working on a way to kill you. If you come to Korea, you wouldn’t work for us, you’d work_ with _us.”_

_It took Aron a while to let the words sink in. But those only told him what he had already felt. Now that he thought about it, Junior was the only person who knew about his powers and wasn’t the least bit afraid of him._

_“…Fine.”_

 

***

 

Aron turned the table into Styrofoam next, broke off a piece and turned the rest back into the wood it had been. The missing chunk wasn’t missing anymore but the table’s total mass would have been less by that amount had somebody measured it.

He turned the styrofoam block in his hand to gummy bears and let them drop on the reestablished table.

Junior was the first to take one and munch it. The others followed his example.

“I can turn any solid into another,” Aron explained, “but it has to be a simple molecular structure. I can’t make things like compound metals.”

Junior took the cue and continued. “Then we have Baekho who can enter and leave wherever, whenever.”

The boy who insisted on being called the white tiger introduced himself and demonstrated by ‘shifting’ and ‘popping’ and explained the ‘rules’ he had empirically figured out.

He spoke with confidence but his voice was incredibly gentle, almost lulling Aron to sleep. There was a clear overall gentleness buried under a façade he had taken on through the life he lived. Which was a terrible one as far as Aron could hear. Baekho talked about the circumstances in his community as if he had never experienced a life where injustice wasn’t at every corner.

 

***

 

_It was a sunny day and the café was quaint. But sitting across the boy who had ‘shot’ him yesterday made Baekho nervous. The sales pitch from the preppy boy wasn’t making him inclined to stay for long._

_“I don’t care about your organization and this Nuest thing..”_

_Junior sipped his espresso. “You’d find guys like you who can-“_

_“I don’t care about making friends.”_

_“There are ways to develop your abilities beyond-“_

_“I don’t care about devel-“_

_“What_ do _you care about, Baekho?”_

_He was stunned for a moment. “My family. My friends. The few people who haven’t screwed my over in that hellhole of a neighborhood.”_

_“How many of those people are there?”_

_“…a dozen or so. Why?”_

_“Are you guys particularly attached to the houses you live in?”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_Junior smiled like a man who knew he had already won. “How about a deal. You come with me and I pay for a dozen or so people to move to a better district. Or a different city. You choose. Perhaps we can even get them jobs.”_

_“_ Deal _.”_

_“You won’t even think about it?”_

_“No. It’s a deal.”_

 

***

 

Something else Aron took away was that Baekho seemed to be fairly dispassionate about anything not involving his family. At least he didn’t bother to mention anything else.

Then it was the next boy’s turn. Aron quickly found out that the one called Minhyun was quite talkative.

Junior chuckled already before Minhyun had even told them about his powers. Baekho was visibly taken aback by the idea that the handsome boy could read minds. Apparently he had spent years invading dreams before Junior had showed him how to expand his ability and he had made progress fast.

Minhyun established what he called a mindscape. Everyone sent their thoughts out into the room and the boys could hear each other. It was as if every boy’s voice came from directly next to Aron’s ear. It weren’t exactly the same voices as in vocal speech. Apparently he heard their inner voices that they used to talk to themselves.

He wondered what his inner voice sounded like to others by comparison to his real one.

It was jarring but Aron was comforted by the fact that he had to think very consciously to reach the others. He could still think in private even while in the mindscape. Minhyun’s story was perhaps even sadder than the tiger’s, with that vanished sister and all.

 

***

 

_Two boys on a roof, the sun rising in front of them._

_Junior had been right. He had woken up hungry. And he had no money left for much of a breakfast. After he thought he had thanked the boy for his breakfast enough times, he dared to ask._

_“First question,” Minhyun said, “If I say no to your idea, will you still give me bus money?”_

_Junior nodded and chuckled._

_“Secondly, what do you know about my sister?”_

_“Only that you’re looking for her.”_

_“And you can help?”_

_“We’ll try. The organization has staff looking for things across the globe all the time.”_

_“Third question. What is expected of me?”_

_“Just come with me for now. Meet the rest. Any more questions?”_

_“I don’t have money right now, so…”_

_“Ha ha. I’ll buy you lunch, too. Let’s get off this roof.”_

 

***

 

As the telepathy demonstration ended it was Junior’s turn to speak again. “And then we have, Ren. Lovely, beautiful Ren, who would make a great couple with a certain someone.”

“The answer is still no,” said Ren towards nobody in particular, not elaborating any further about his powers.

Junior explained instead. “Pure and simple, Ren could kill us all if he wanted. Even me. Even Aron.”

“Wait,” Aron interjected, “How?”

Ren grinned. “I suppose the _tension_ in here is quite thick.”

A cloud of gray smoke formed behind the pretty boy, taking on a monstrous, thin shape with antlers and claws.

Aron tried to push it but his powers reached into a void. There was nothing there to be telekinetically influenced. “I can’t sense it.”

“That,” said Junior, “is because these Conmotes as we call them are made from metaphysical manifestations, while your powers only extend to physically real objects. They can, however, very much hurt you.”

The Conmote’s arm became a crude blade to the smiling Ren’s obvious delight.

“Ren’s ability is to assess emotions inside people and in social situations as a whole. Actually, I have a theory that your powers, Aron, wouldn’t work in Baekho’s Twi either. Something to test later. Now, I promised to tell you something about me, right?”

 

***

 

_The phone rang twice before someone picked up. Ren heard the voice on the other end. It wasn’t the weird boy from the park. Thank goodness._

_“Yeah, hi. I got this number from a creepy guy who told me you’re a secret organization.”_

_“Yes, we thought it was better if somebody else spoke to you. From a phone, so your ability wouldn’t interfere.”_

_“Whatever. If I join you guy, how much do you pay and do I have to see that weirdo again?”_

 

***

 

The Conmote vanished and the boys’ attention turned to the self-declared leader.

“I know things," he said. "I can see the future with perfect clarity, every path’s probability laid out. Other information pertaining to the past and present is fully clear to me. Though admittedly, that only works when it feels like it, which is very sporadically.”

“Wait,” Minhyun interrupted, “the future? How does that work? How far and what do you see?”

“Well, I can tell anything that might happen with about five or more percent of probability. Below that I can hardly ever see anything. I can predict a fighter’s next move the moment he decides on it. I know where Baekho will pop the moment he chooses a spot. I knew he’d be uneasy about Minhyun’s power as soon as it became likely we would talk about the subject.”

He looked around the room. “Let me give you more examples. If the screw in my chair was loose and it would collapse under me, I’d know to avoid it. Potentially days in advance. If one of you decided to loosen the screw to watch me tumble, I’d only know from the moment you decided to do it.”

Junior kicked an unoccupied chair he had been standing behind the whole time and it fell into two pieces. “This one – my random-information-sense tells me – was simply not set up right by the guy who furnished this room for us. This is our designated common room by the way. Are any of you decent at gaming? Or we could watch anime.”

“What is that random-information-sense?” Aron asked.

“Right. I have more knowledge sometimes. About all kind of things. We don’t know where it comes from. It seems like a contextual ability that depends on a trigger. This is how I knew about all of your existence. It popped into my head. That happens occasionally. So does other stuff. For example, Aron’s phone unlocks with the code one-one-one-eight. Ren is mildly allergic to certain laundry detergents. Minhyun stubbed his toe on the way to the meeting and Baekho-“

 “This is so creepy,” the white tiger yelled. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

Junior nodded. “See, I knew in advance you would say that. There was a ninety percent chance.”

“Keep it shut I said.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your thoughts so far? See you in the first story arc.


	6. Fortune's Flaw (1)

It had been a busy week for all of them. Aron wasn’t used to people telling him what to do anymore, but Junior had no trouble giving orders. All the boys took part in a medical survey, then a test to define the extent of their abilities and a few training sessions to teach them the basics of self-defense.

Not that Aron needed to know how to dodge roll. He was too powerful for that. But he indulged them regardless. Junior, who had been at the facility for a few years, was a pretty skilled fighter. Ren and Minhyun who could potentially get into a situation without a way out profited the most from the lessons.

Ren however was much more interested in refining his Conmotes. Which gave all the others ample targets for defense training. The harder they fought, the more their emotions got riled up, the more Conmotes Ren could construct. His record was five constructs made from the fight power of four boys.

Aron tried to get along with everybody. But it was harder than expected. After such a long time as an all-powerful boy in custody of the government he hadn’t developed his social skills much.

The most helpful was Minhyun, who did his best to make the boy’s meetings frictionless with amusing stories and general nicety.

They all grew a little closer over the days. But still, Aron thought the whole affair was a bit strange. No one had told him yet what the purpose of Nuest was.

 

***

 

In the common room, Junior waited for everyone to sit down before he did. Aron hadn’t seen the boy this nervous all week. What was he going to say?

“The reason you’re here, in the organization, is simple and complicated at the same time. My ability allows me to see arbitrarily far into the future, but things get more and more foggy further on. The motion of the stars is basically the only thing I can foresee for hundreds of years, everything else is subject to change as people make decisions.”

He took a deep breath. “A month or so ago, I stopped seeing anything past the 27th of March. That’s only three weeks away now. I panicked and my other ability – that lets me see the present – shot into overdrive. That’s how I knew you all exist.”

Ren leaned forward. “You’re saying the world has no future?”

“Worse. I can’t even see the movement of the stars past that date anymore. Somebody has found a way to destroy the world, maybe even the universe. And they firmly decided to use it. We need to stop them. And we’re on the clock.”

Nuest had a mission.

 

***

 

It was quite unreal. Aron couldn’t imagine what it had to be like for the others. He was used to being driven to a place knowing he’d have to storm it. But the rest of the boys were new to the idea.

Not that they were going in guns – and telekinesis – blazing. This was a stealth mission.

The suspicious company CourtesySolutions, which inhabited their destination, was a likely candidate for causing the end of the world. CS had no clear purpose other than offering some vague consulting service that nobody actually used. For a small company they were amazingly secretive. Personnel was so carefully vetted that it hadn’t been possible to get a mole in. What little communication had been intercepted and decrypted was telling. The company served as a covert operation that was active across the globe and occasionally reported back to their head quarter.

The most precious resource was knowledge. Baekho was supposed to get in, grab a few hard-drives and get out. The rest of the boys came along just in case things turned sour.

Their armored limousine pulled into the parking garage next to CS’s facilities and the driver found a spot on the ground floor.

It was way past office hours. The only problems were alarms and possible guards.

“Okay,” Junior said, “We will have constant contact to you via Minhyun whenever you’re in reality. If anything goes wrong, don’t stick around. Shift and bail. Got it?”

“Yes. You keep repeating yourself.” Baekho peeled himself off the leather seat and put his ski mask on before leaving the car.

“Just making sure. Anyway, you wait for the signal, then you go.”

“I know.”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘yes, sir’.”

“Sir?” Baekho said. “Like you’re better than me? I could beat you in a fair fight any day.”

Junior sighed, but didn’t press the point further.

The tiger left and made his way up to the edge of the parking garage’s roof. Previous surveillance had revealed that the main data storage place was on the ninth floor. That would be Baekho’s target.

Back in the car Minhyun built the mindscape encompassing the CS’s tower and established a connection with the boy on the roof.

“Baekho, there are no guards on level nine or ten. There’s one doing rounds on eight. I think he’s leaving for seven, so you’re good. Go as soon as Aron does his thing.”

Aron did ‘his thing’ which was cause a total blackout in the company’s facility by overloading the electric lines.

The building went dark. Baekho went in. While he was shifted, Minhyun couldn’t reach him. They had determined that the simplest way in was to carry a crowbar, fly up to the balcony on level ten, break the door open and walk in before popping back. The door would remain intact in reality, leaving no trace.

No one was surprised to hear Minhyun announce that the boy had made it inside.

Baekho reported what he saw and Junior told him what to shove in his backpack. The tiger stole a dozen hard-drives in only a few minutes. Everything was going well. The group heard Baekho’s intent to get out of the building.

Then the light turned back on.

“Aron?” Junior said.

But Aron had no explanation. He tried to damage the structure again, but it was impossible.

“Something happened. I can’t do anything to the building. It’s like my powers are being directed around it.”

Junior’s eyes widened. “They must have an internal power source and some way to block your powers. That should be impossible. And I didn’t foresee it. That should be extra impossible. Minhyun?”

The telepathic boy answered “I can still talk to him. But someone’s coming. They’re shooting.”

“Tell him to get out.”

“He says… _He can’t shift_! _Somethings blocking him_.”

Aron could see the fear in Junior’s eyes. This was not a contingency they had planned for. Precognition had failed. They were going to lose Baekho.


	7. Fortune's Flaw (2)

“Agents of the void,” Minhyun mumbled. “Are those our guys?”

“What are you talking about?” Junior said. “No, I’ve never heard about ‘agents of the void’. Why?”

“They’re coming. Here. I can hear their thoughts. They’re not letting me stay in their head, though. They… _have bazookas_!”

Junior looked around, either assessing the current situation or the future one. “Out!”

The boys shuffled out of the car just in time to see several trucks pull into the garage with screeching tires. The vehicles came to a halt as the breaks were slammed and the ‘agents of the void’ poured out aiming huge weapons.

The four boys jumped aside as the first explosive ammunition impacted on their car and turned it into a fireball. Junior pulled Ren to safety behind a concrete pillar. Minhyun was rolling on the ground and tried to crawl under a nearby car.

Aron strode forward with confidence. There was nothing they could hit him with.

Three bazooka hits came his way simultaneously. They weren’t even aimed well, he thought, as they slammed into the ground before him. He told the pressure and flames to leave him alone and they obeyed dutifully. No problem.

Except the aim had been botched on purpose. The ground crumbled under the boy. The parking garage had sublevels.

Since he couldn’t use his telekinesis on himself he was confronted with his kryptonite. Gravity.

Aron dropped out of sight, vanishing into the lower levels.

 

***

 

Baekho’s heart was racing. He was safe in the janitor’s closet, but for how long? He couldn’t stay in Twi for more than a few seconds before getting pulled back. And it took all his concentration to get there in the first place. No way could he fight like that.

Technically he was armed with a crowbar, but the guards had guns.

Worse still, Minhyun wasn’t answering him anymore. Oh, and he was in his underwear. As it turned out it was _so_ hard to shift into Twi that he kept leaving even the things on his body behind whether he wanted or not. The stolen drives were gone, too, of course.

He heard steps. Clutching the bar he listened intently past the sound of his blood rushing through his ears.

The door opened as somebody pulled a valid access card through the slit.

“In here!” yelled the guard the seconds he saw the half-naked boy.

Baekho shifted before the man could raise his weapon.

Where was the next door? Ah, a glass door to the stair case. Perfect. The tiger slammed the bar into the glass and hopped through the moment he was forced to pop back. He had barely made it.

On the other side was another guard.

Luckily this time Baekho had the element of surprise. He threw the bar and jumped the ducking guy. A few kicks later and the uniformed man went down. Up close they weren’t that tough.

He heard a click behind his head – a magazine reloading.

“Slowly turn around!”

There were more. And they were coming from both ends of the stairs. And the one he had just run from was already waiting behind the glass door.

He tried to shift. As hard as possible. But Twi wasn’t responding right, it only gave him bits and pieces. Instead of letting him step through, there was an odd magnetic attraction between him and the other side, but he couldn’t get there.

“Drop to the ground, boy. Now!”

Baekho focused on the connection. For his own safety, he complied with the orders, but he hadn’t given up. He had never felt his ability this way. Usually it took a fraction of a second to get into Twi. He hadn’t had an opportunity to examine the precise workings of the connection in detail.

The five man around him slowly, carefully closed in. They were waiting for something. Orders or backup, it didn’t matter.

The tugging at the connection had a violent result.

Twi broke.

An indescribably strange substance - not quite liquid, not quite gas – erupted from Baekho’s body and slammed the guards to the ground. The boy held a fraction of twilight itself – a wobbling orb that was neither dark nor light – kind of a variable gray that changed with the surrounding, impossible to pin down.

“Hey, he’s doing something. Shoot him, shoot him!”

The tiger grinned. He pushed the orb forward letting it leave his grasp. It stayed in reality. The twilight orb hit the yelling man in the face, flattening his nose and knocking him out. Baekho’s grin grew brighter. He could work with that.

He’d even get the drives back. Well, first his pants, then the drives.


	8. Fortune's Flaw (3)

Ren was the only one left with an ability to match bazookas. Despite his panicked state, he could produce at least a couple of simple, curved shields from the surrounding aggression. Not cohesive enough to turn into a full Conmote, but still able to block a hit. While the wobbling substance failed to coalesce it at least moved where Ren directed it. With Junior’s foreknowledge it was trivial to put them in the right spots.

Explosive ammunition detonated at the nebulous, red-ish barriers.

Minhyun yelled from under the truck. “Aron is on his way back up. He fell two levels down. But his leg’s hurt.”

“Alright, if you can link with him and me at the same time, keep me updated.” Junior shouted back, over the bombardment. He turned to Ren. “Twenty percent chance they hit a vital column and the whole building comes down on us. We have to do something.”

The agents of the void switched tactic.

“They must have noticed,” Ren whispered, “that I can’t build a complete shield around us.”

Carrying multiple guns so big that it took two man each to move them, the agents slowly surrounded the pillar the duo used as cover.

Ren dropped all his barriers, hoping the agents would be too stumped to react quickly, and did his best to focus on calming down. A nebulous figure of dark smoke began to form in front of Ren. He gave it long, long claws.

Bullets did nothing to Aggression – a vicious fighter Conmote.

It took three seconds for the agents to notice that. Five more to really realize what that meant. And another ten until they had all shed their gear and were on the run.

With the aggression turned to terror, Ren had no choice but to dissolve the Conmote. Instead he constructed a new one – Fear.

The pitch black figure with a horribly distorted humanoid shape took form at the entrance, cutting the agent’s path off. Just as they scrambled into their cars, Fear stepped into view and began slashing away at the engine cover. They scrambled to get back _out_ of the car again.

Ren was satisfied with the results and was about to ask Junior for the next steps when…

Aron blasted a door off its hinges, raining white hot metal on the concrete. He was angry. He hopped on one leg which distracted a bit from the image, but he was _angry_.

The nearest agent lost the ground under his feet as it evaporated and he dropped a level down with a surprised scream suddenly ending in a fleshy smack, followed by muffled groaning from below. The nearest truck went up in a fountain of plasma.

“That’s one way to save the day,” said Junior. “Ren, can you help Minhyun out from under there, he’s telling me he’s stuck on something.”

Ren let go of Fear and complied.

The agents were retreating, firing the automatic guns from their trucks. It didn’t stop Aron in the slightest but the bullet hail as enough to obscure his vision. He redirected the shots into the dust-spraying concrete all around him.

Baekho popped at the far end of the parking garage and walked closer, surprised by the gun shot noises. While Minhyun crawled out from under his hiding spot he reestablished the link and told Baekho what had transpired.

Ren patted the dust off Minhyun’s clothes.

 

***

 

What was he supposed to do?

Aron pondered his options. This was an intelligence gathering mission after all, so…

He decided to catch a few of these idiots of the void.

As the fleeing cars left the garage, he bent down, touched the ground and turned the road from under his hand all the way to the last vehicle into chocolate pudding. Cold one, because it had to be a solid, but the car sank anyway.

The agents got stuck and were left behind by the ones further ahead. The organization’s own operatives that had been stationed at strategic locations around the block could easily take them into custody.

Aron calmed down a little as the rest of the agents had fully retreated. He could have set them all on fire, but as long as he didn’t know how exactly the organization did their missions, he tried to keep the body count low.

Looking behind him it seemed that the most muscular Nuest member was back with a backpack full of goodies.

Doing his best to put no weight onto the leg that hurt from the fall, he stumbled back to the group and greeted them, smiling through the pain.

“Did we get what we came for?” he asked.

Baekho showed off his results. “All collected.”

“Your shirt is inside out by the way.”

“I know, I was in a hurry to get away.”

“Why did you take it off?”

“Why didn’t you turn off the lights like we planned?”

“I dunno, Junior didn’t know they had an emergency generator somewhere inside and there was a force field that- Where is he, anyway?”

The four boys looked around until Ren screamed and made them all converge at the pillar Junior had been hiding behind.

There was a lot of blood. Junior’s hand was holding his stomach where he was bleeding from, but that did nothing to stop him from dying.

He smiled wearily. “Bullet reflected…ceiling…one in a million chance…couldn’t…see it coming.”

“No!” Ren shouted. “You’ll pull through. You’re going to make it out alive.”

“Sorry…zero percent chance…”

The boy stopped talking as blood dripped from his mouth the same time a tear left his eye.


	9. Fortune's Flaw (4)

It took Aron a few seconds to realize why he was so angry.

He was angry at himself. He had never felt so useless. And he didn’t know where to put his frustration.

Ren had sunken to the floor next to Junior, whispering things Aron couldn’t hear over the blood rushing through his ears.

Minhyun knelt down next to the dying boy and took his hand. “I’ll link with you. If there is anything you’d like to say, I’ll pass it on. We’ll stay by your side. Can we do anything to- _What?!_ “

The two standing boys and Ren jumped at the shout. Minhyun was having a conversation but they only got to hear one half, since Junior spoke telepathically.

“… But what did I do to cause that? Oh! … What are the chances? … Still better than nothing … Of course I’ll try … Can you tell me how?”

Carefully Minhyun laid the moaning leader down from the sitting position and placed his hands over the bleeding wound.

Incredibly bright light filled the area, oozing out of Minhyun’s hands. There was a sound both too high and too deep to hear properly. Warmth radiated from Minhyun. But not through the air. It developed directly on the skin.

Aron fell to the ground with a squeal as his broken leg snapped back into its proper place.

The light ceased.

Junior sat up, coughing but healed.

Ren slapped him. “Don’t ever scare me like this.”

In turn Junior smiled at the group, rubbing his reddening cheek. “Our dear Minhyun doesn’t just connect minds, he connects people. And thus also, well, a single body to itself on a cellular level. This was close. And it hurt. Dying kind of sucks. Let’s try not to rely on my ability to magically conjure knowledge from who knows where.”

Aron raised his hand. “Minhyun accidentally healed my leg, too.”

A gray shimmering orb showed up in Baekho’s hand. “While we’re on the topic of developing new powers. I got one, too.”

Junior and Ren pulled each other up. The bloody boy looked down on his shirt. “I shouldn’t have worn my good one to a mission.”

Ren slapped him again. “You almost died. Don’t joke about that.”

“What if I just like it when you hit me?”

The next slap didn’t come as Ren’s hand froze in midair. “Well played.”

Finally the operatives from around the block arrived. There was a lot of damage to hide. Aron was told to collapse the building once everybody was outside. Easier to blame it all on shoddy construction.

 

***

 

“They know practically everything,” the computer scientist said.

All of Nuest sank back into their chairs simultaneously. This was going to be a lengthy explanation.

The sun was setting outside, so Junior turned on the lights of the common room while the scientist drew up files on the screen. The engineers of the organization had worked overnight and the whole following day to decrypt the hard drives and filter relevant content from them.

“It’s obvious that they have an insider amongst us,” the man continued. “They have all the files on you boys. Including the blood tests we ran only one day before your mission yesterday. There are detailed discussions on how to engage each of you. The thing that reflected Aron’s power is called APR which stands for, well… Aron’s Powers Reflector. There is no mention of what it is and how it works but there are strict rules never to describe it in case of information breach. So they were even prepared for loosing. The thing that blocked Baekho’s powers was another such item but we know even less about that.”

Aron had been told that the building that contained CS was to be left alone – explicitly. As if he just went around leveling things he didn’t like. It made sense to leave it be since it was easy to compromise in the chaos. If the agents of the void wanted to retrieve anything they would open themselves up for spying.

The scientist sighed. “However we can now say with great confidence that the event that will occur on March 27th is connected to them. They have a series of items that they ‘retrieved’ from locations around the planet. Only one is described in detail, the rest seems to be under the same ‘need to know’ ban as the APR.”

The boys were shown a schematic of something eldritch. It wasn’t clearly organic or technological. Its geometry had several symmetries, slightly broken by odd twists in its form. The numbers indicated it was small and light enough to be carried by a very strong person.

“They have been running tests for years and finally feel able to turn it on soon.”

“Except,” Junior said, “it’s a doomsday device and they don’t even know it. Where does it come from?”

“We don’t know because they don’t know. But there are logs of its activities.”

The boys read the file in silence. It became clear why the scientist hadn’t summarized the content. What they read was wholly unbelievable. The device caused disruptions in time. Plants close to it grew faster of slower than logically possible depending on where in its cycle the device was.  It swung between accelerating and delaying time in its immediate vicinity.

Long logs detailed the many ways in which the agents of the void had poked the gadget to make it do anything different. The logs didn’t plan any further into the future than the 26th. They knew they were going to do something too big to make plans for how it turned out.

Aron was done reading last – his Korean wasn’t up to all the technical language.

“So… We have to find them, obviously.”

Junior sighed. “I hope the interrogators are successful with the one’s you captured. Or I have a random insight. Would be really helpful now. But until we have more information, let’s pass the time with gaming.”

Ren face-palmed. “You’re impossible.”

“I knew you would say that with ninety-five percent probability.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arc one over. Will they prevent the end of the world? Will Ren reciprocate Junior’s feelings? Will Baekho take his shirt off again? Tune in next time.


	10. Healing Time - A

They had one week left to stop the end of the world. There was nothing to do for him but wait.

Baekho had never been too good at figuring out his feelings. For the longest time in his life it had been an advantage not to show any. But back in those days he had a very special reason to keep going.

He had expected if his family ever found a way into a better life he would feel overwhelming happiness. But there was only this odd lack of drive left in him. What kept him going now that his life’s mission had been so incidentally accomplished by the organization?

 

***

 

“-and both your cousins work at that factory I mentioned, it’s finalized. The pay is really good there so I expect to become an aunt soon.”

Baekho’s mother had been rambling about every single family member that had been helped by the organization. And the other people in their community that had been resettled under the pretense of a social mobility program. If only his loved ones had moved, it would have seemed suspicious and they needed to believe he had found his new job by total coincidence.

The boy had the phone lying next to him on speaker, not really paying attention as he did crunches on his carpet. Occasionally he acknowledged her tale with a noncommittal grunt.

She went on. “I’m still surprised every day when I walk into the bathroom and the water is actually warm. I had forgotten what a working boiler does to brighten my life. But you know what would really brighten my day the most?”

Baekho sighed. Was she going to bring this up every time?

“Mom, you know I can’t just drop by. First of all we’re cities apart and-“

“Yes yes, I know. You always say your job description includes staying where you are. But I still don’t get what it is you _do_? And don’t give me that vague nonsense again. I know you well enough to know that nobody would hire you in a consulting position of any kind, and off the street no less. You’re not _that_ smart.”

“Wow thanks, mom. It’s not like you raised me or anything.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Look, it’s really hard to describe but as long as the checks keep rolling in you don’t have to-“

“Listen here, boy!” Her voice was rather strained at that point. She must have decided to press the issue this time, no matter what. “If what you’re doing is illegal, young man, I’ll give you the first spanking of your life.”

“No, mom. I sent you all those official documents for you tax files, remember. It’s totally legal.”

His mother did one of her exaggerate sighs, which meant she was willing to let it rest. The conversation turned back to Baekho’s relatives and soon they said their goodbyes.

The crunches hadn’t tired him out. Perhaps he just needed to punch things again.

 

***

 

The building in which the boys were stationed was used for a multitude of purposes but it certainly had all the comfort of a hotel. One of Baekho’s favorite facilities was the training room where he hit bags until he felt better.

He had done so pretty much every day since the failure at CourtesySolutions. They were just sitting around anyway. What little he was told didn’t sound promising. The agents of the void were extremists. They were perfectly fine following orders without knowing what they were accomplishing at all as long as they were lead to believe it furthered their nebulous agenda.

Everybody was getting antsy as the end of the world drew closer. Baekho wasn’t immune to the general rise in anxiety, but didn’t feel any particular way about the issue, unable to conceptualize what it really meant. Or at least that was what Ren had told him after assessing his emotional landscape.

It all came down to the previous train of thought again. What was he fighting for? Everyone he cared about was safe – at least until earth exploded or whatever was going to happen on the 27th.

 

***

 

The five boys usually ate together. They even had an extra room next to the regular employee’s cafeteria for that purpose.

Baekho didn’t really like being treated like a special snowflake but it meant he didn’t have to queue for food – and seconds and thirds – which was a boon as far as he was concerned. He’d have to find out how they made the Ramyun here so delicious and put an end to it. He had to be gaining weight at this point, no way around it.

“How are your Twi orb experiments going?” Junior asked. He was loosely holding onto Ren’s hip, sitting very close to the pretty boy on a bench that had huge amounts of free space. Was the coming doomsday what had brought them together? Where they official? Why did he even care?

“I’m fairly precise now,” Baekho said between bites. “And I can shoot about every two or three seconds so I guess I’m unbeatable in melee.”

Junior nodded and smiled. He did that a lot, always encouraging his members.

Minhyun stole a scoop of rice from Aron’s dish and the two got into an argument that included kicking each other under the table until Aron simply reached over and vaporized Minhyun’s plate.

“Hey, no fair! You should be nicer to me, Aron. I could give you nightmares on purpose.”

The accused only chuckled. “Have you ever?”

“I’m strongly considering creating a precedent.”

 Their bickering was cute to watch. Cute to watch? Since when did he have thought like that?

Baekho’s chop stick holding hand froze in midair, the noodles slowly sliding back into the bowl. He had brothers now. He had a new family. And he had grown _incredibly_ fond of them. When was the last time anyone had entered the circle of people who meant something to him rather than left it? When had been the last time somebody had been nice to him and not asked for money right after?

He _cared_. He didn’t want to see them hurt. He had something to fight for after all.

Now if only it wasn’t one week till the end of the world with no lead to preventing it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These healing time chapters will come in between all arcs to give some character development and breathing space. Going forward each arc will be from the perspective of one boy the whole way through.


	11. Slayer of Dawn (1)

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

Minhyun hadn’t slept all night. There had to be something they could do.

He met the others at breakfast, but nobody showed much appetite. Going by their bloodshot eyes, they hadn’t been able to get much sleep either. Baekho looked gloomy but smiled at him as he sat down. Junior and Ren were next to each other but didn’t interact. The fifth boy was pacing.

“What if,” Aron said, running in circles, “I commit to just destroying one hemisphere. Then your future sense should reveal if the end will still occur. If it does I commit to the other hemisphere instead because then we know the cause of doom is there. Once we have the hemisphere down, we split it in two again and continue like that. Binary search.”

Junior shook his head. “Making decisions just to test their consequences through me doesn’t work, especially if it’s unlikely you could actually go through with those actions. We figured that out soon after I came here while testing my ability’s limit. And we don’t even know if you’re capable of such widespread destruction. And what if the device has a force field like the CS building. That’s pretty likely if you think about it.”

“So,” Minhyun said, “What happens now?”

It was on Junior to answer since he had the closest contact to the higher up staff members. “The non-essential personnel is at home with their families although most of them haven’t been told much. Special troops are on high alert all over the planet in every branch of the organization just in case we figure something out last minute.”

“Is that likely?” Minhyun said, hinting at Junior’s ability to make information pop into his head in times of crisis.

“I have no probabilities. I sat in the captured agents’ cells and did what I could to make my past-sense respond but they just don’t know anything important. I think they were fed more false information than we. I was told the mole was caught, by the way. But he didn’t know anything either.”

Junior let his head sink into his hands and Ren gave him a back hug. It was frustrating for the boy not to have any information to supply. Minhyun didn’t need Ren’s ability to know that.

 

***

 

“M-Minhyun?”

Aron’s head pocked into the room.

Minhyun got up from the lotus position. ”Sorry, come in. I didn’t hear you knock. I was meditating.”

“I’m jealous you can still do that with- with all this going on.”

“Yeah. So… why did you want to talk to me?”

Aron was clearly uncomfortable. Whatever he was about to say, he looked like he was forcing every word. He avoided eye contact and couldn’t keep his hands steady.

“See… Since this is maybe our…last day? I just…I though…would you go on a date with me? It’s totally fine if you don’t you probably have plans for the last few hours and I’m not saying you have to-“

“Yes.”

“Yes? Like really yes?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t think about what you would do if I said yes.”

“I did!”

Minhyun waited while the beaming boy took a few deep breaths as the nervousness of asking someone out fell off him.

“Actually,” Aron continued, “I could only narrow it down to two things. Picnic on the roof, overlooking the city, or a more classic coffee date in that tiny bakery around the corner.”

Minhyun shrugged. “You pick.”

“No, you.”

“No, y- Fine I’ll toss a coin.”

 

***

 

One hour until the end and Minhyun was having fun. The bakery made exquisite pastries and having Aron feed them to him bit by bit made them all the more enjoyable. They were sharing stories from their childhood with no inhibitions.

If this was how the world ended, Minhyun was surprisingly contempt with it. He didn’t look at any clocks. He didn’t want to know when the moment came.

 

***

 

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

Minhyun hadn’t slept all night. There had to be something they could do.

Junior was mumbling to himself at breakfast and everyone kept their distance from him. Maybe he had gone crazy from the stress. Ren – who certainly had a clearer picture of the leader’s emotions – didn’t seem too worried.

Aron was pacing. He looked at Junior as if he had something to tell him but didn’t dare to interrupt the quiet ramblings.

Finally he exploded. Minhyun froze in mid motion as Aron yelled at Junior. “Hey! If you could shut up for a moment maybe I could focus, you know. Actually I though what if I commit to-“

Junior groaned. “My sense that gives me random information must have gone into overdrive again, but this is the first time I can’t figure out how to use the knowledge. I clearly remember living through today already, but in those fake memories is nothing to be done.”

The group fell silent. Minhyun realized they were likely all thinking the same thing and didn’t dare to speak up. If Junior’s information was useless there was probably nothing they could do. The boy’s ability was telling him that there was no way out.

 

***

 

“Actually,” Aron continued, “I could only narrow it down to two things. Picnic on the roof, overlooking the city, or a more classic coffee date in that tiny bakery around the corner.”

Minhyun shrugged. “You pick.”

“No, you.”

“No, y- Fine I’ll toss a coin.”

 

***

 

It was in the middle of the day so the romantic atmosphere of a sunset was not granted to them. Regardless, the roof picnic was pretty dreamy. Aron was laying in Minhyun’s lap, getting grapes fed to him. They were shaded by a simple screen Aron had transfigured from the roof’s concrete.

Since they weren’t in public there was no need to pretend speaking was necessary. It was much easier to communicate via mindscape. They shared their secrets openly. Minhyun got to delve deeper into Aron’s mind than anyone else ever had. With the end approaching there were no inhibitions.

He didn’t look at any clocks. He didn’t want to know when it was going to end.

 

***

 

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away…


	12. Slayer of Dawn (2)

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

Minhyun hadn’t slept all night. There had to be something they could do.

Junior and Aron were missing at breakfast. Minhyun didn’t see them the rest of the day. He hung around Ren and Baekho but the two didn’t have much in common and the conversations were stilted.

There wasn’t much to do, so he meditated a bit until construction noises disturbed him. Expanding his thoughts a little he could tell that several operatives were stationed on the roof and working on something big. Junior and Aron were both there. The boy with the transmutation ability created many identical satellite dish arrays from a templet.

Was there something they could do last minute?

He stayed in his room. If they needed him they knew where to find him. But he couldn’t keep his curiosity down.

Careful not to disrupt an important ongoing process he knocked on the door of Junior’s consciousness.

The waking mindscape was different from the dreamscape in that it was much more coherent but a lot less telling. Peoples’ surface thoughts didn’t give away all the juicy bits their subconscious processed during the night. It was almost like looking through Junior’s eyes, but filtered strongly by what the boy considered important or relevant in the moment, giving Minhyun strong tunnel vision.

“Hey,” Junior said mentally. “What’s up?”

“You sound chipper. Do you have good news?” Minhyun sent up.

“Maybe it’s nothing. If it works I’ll tell you next time.”

“Next time?”

“Sorry, I have to coordinate a lot of these arrays across the globe. I’d love to chat but today of all days we’re short on staff. Sent home all the unimportant ones. If I had knowns we’d need the programmers then- Sorry, I really have to go.”

“Alright.” Minhyun severed the link. What was that about? Well if it prevented the end of the world, he’d know soon.

 

***

 

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

Minhyun hadn’t slept all night. There had to be something they could do.

Junior stormed into the dining room during breakfast, startling everyone except Ren who must have felt his emotions before he entered.

“Listen up,” he said, grinning. “This is going to sound mad, but trust me.”

When he was sure he had everybody’s attention he continued. “Were stuck in a time loop. I remember this day from last time. We’re living today for at least the fourth time now. And the best part, I’m probably the only person on earth who knows this is happening. It’s my ability.”

“Which means,” said Ren, immediately accepting the outrageous idea, “the agents of the void keep making the same mistakes every time. If we can find out where they are-“

“Japan.” Junior waved them to follow him. “Last loop, which was the third one, we tried to find out if there was anything odd going on in the seconds before the reset. Since I can now bring information into the next loop that’s a viable tactic. Turns out there is a massive radio wave surge somewhere near Tokyo seconds before it all ends.”

The four boys were trudging behind their leader who dashed through the corridors.

“It’ll take us one hour to Japan. There we’ll try to pinpoint the source of the signal. But that’s the worst case. Now that we have a specific city we should make a lot more progress. Let’s see if we can stop this looping business.”

 

***

 

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

Minhyun hadn’t slept all night. There had to be something they could do.

Junior stormed into the room with several man trailing behind him. They distributed gear. Helmets? Weren’t those for helicopter pilots? Minhyun realized that they were going to be flying.

“Alright boys, fifth try.”

 

***

 

A few minutes later they were in the air, still digesting the news. A coastal area on the far side of Japan was the source of all those time loops. If those loops were really happening. It all seemed a bit strange to Minhyun.

He was in the loud, tight, wobbly helicopter, sitting close to Aron. He established a link and they did their best to calm each other down during the uncomfortable flight.

 

***

 

“We have less than one minute left.” Junior was tearing at his hair, turning back and forth. They had wandered through the neighborhood but found no sign of activity that hinted at the agents of the void.

“Aron?”

“Yes, leader?”

“Level the area.”

Several of the accompanying operatives protested and Minhyun was tempted to join them. The whole suburban town had been evacuated under the pretense of a chemical spill but total destruction was still a bit excessive.

“Are… are you sure?” Aron hesitated to comply but had instinctively taken on the stance Minhyun new as his ‘about to use amazing powers’ posture.

“Yes, we’re about to reset in a few seconds. If we stop looping and the damage becomes permanent it would still be worth it. If not we can take the information for next time. Do it. Now!”

Aron caused an upheaval of hellish proportions. Minhyun pressed his hands on his ears to escape the overwhelming sound. No earthquake could have caused that much devastation. It was as if the ground exploded as far as the eye could see, leaving only the small piece of street unaffected on which they all stood, reverse avalanches shooting up around them and coming back down like a meteor shower.

Three seconds to the end of the world.

A force field was uncovered. There had been a deeply hidden substructure, immune to Aron’s shenanigans.

Junior squinted through the settling dust. “Sons of bi-“


	13. Slayer of Dawn (3)

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

Minhyun hadn’t slept all night. There had to be something they could do.

Junior entered at breakfast with grim determination. “Listen up. We’re going to Japan. I’ll explain once we’re in the air. I’m not wasting another second.”

 

***

 

“We can assume,” Junior told everyone through Minhyun’s link since it was impossible to speak over the rotor noises, “they have a way to block Aron’s and Baekho’s powers. This is mostly a reconnaissance mission. If they don’t even notice were there we’ll just have more information for the next loop. If they do notice they would probably delay their experiment and we get more time to fight them. I give it three more loops max till we win.”

Minhyun wished he could have shared that confidence. This entire loop thing was difficult to wrap his head around. But he was glad that there was something to do at last.

 

***

 

Junior ordered the accompanying staff around. “The substructure is exactly under there. From the telephone pole all the way to the lone tree. Basically, it’s a long bunker, but a bit unevenly thick.”

Distributing small boxes throughout the area the operatives set up a grid of sensors. Meanwhile the boys walked around and shoved explosives into the ground through holes that Aron burned into the earth.

The hope was that they could locate an entrance via wave reflection. This technique was used to find oil reservoirs and other subterranean systems. If a tunnel led from the surface all the way into the bunker they should be able to find it.

All the tiny explosives went off at the same time, feeding sensor information into a hastily set up laptop on a crate in the middle of the deserted street.

It was eerie to see a completely empty suburban town. Way to quiet. Minhyun effortlessly linked them all into his mindscape network to keep the operatives from listening in on their conversation. Connecting all five boys at once had become easy for him by now.

“Junior?" he asked, "What’s the plan exactly? If Aron and Baekho can’t do their thing how do we get in?”

“Well, for one thing we still have you. It could be enough if you look through a few heads to get a feeling for what’s going on. There’s also the possibility that a random piece of information pops into my head.”

“But shouldn’t we at least take more precautions? We’re on top of an enemy base after all. Think of what happened last time when we encountered the agents of the void. Why is it just us fighting again?”

“I told you it’s just for information gathering and so we-“

Ren interrupted their talk by speaking over them in the link. “He has doubts, Junior. The others are fine going along with whatever and I know for sure that you have all the knowledge from your ability working because you feel like you always feel when it works. But Minhyun can’t quite get himself to blindly accept that our actions might have no consequences in two hours.”

Junior shot a quick glance at the empath before turning back to the dream walker. “Oh, I see. Sorry Minhyun, but I can only reassure you that I know what I know.”

They were interrupted by the results of the geological survey. There were multiple entrances. Most of them through houses in the area which made sense as it kept them conveniently hidden. There was one way however that was much bigger and less well camouflaged.

Just a few dry bushes were laid across the gates in the ground and Aron waved them away.

“This has to be the biggest tunnel inside”, Junior mused aloud. “They needed a way to get equipment in, which was too big for the private entrances in the houses. It’s as likely to be guarded than any other entrance. Minhyun?”

“I can sense dozens of people, all very focused or very bored. I can't find out more without them noticing I'm in their heads.”

“Scientists and guards respectively,” Baekho said with a chuckle. He had been quiet but now that a fight was potentially immanent his attention was back on track. “I say we go in and see how much damage we can do. Did we bring any more explosives?”

“Reconnaissance,” reminded Junior.

“Screw that.”

It took a few moments of back and forth debate but eventually they decided to wait until the reset was only minutes away and then storm the place. In the meantime Minhyun kept a close eye on the people inside. He couldn’t get into their heads without establishing a link and even if they wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening, they’d certainly notice something was up. That was another drawback in comparison to dreamscape walking.

 

***

 

Aron made the gate in the ground so hot it evaporated. There was an empty, round hole, leading – at a steep slope – to a reinforced door protected by the force field that reflected his abilities.

Minhyun stepped back and let the boy find out if the force field also blocked other things. It was always a bit frightening to see the American use his powers. And apparently he had even destroyed the entire town in a previous loop if Junior was to be believed. Now he was pulling an enormous block of titanium from the ground, transmuted from dirt.

“How much kinetic energy do you think it’ll take to get through the door?”

No one answered Aron so Minhyun felt compelled to reply. “I suppose you should start lightly and go harder if it’s not enough.”

“Okay. Here goes nothing.”

The block as wide as the hole slammed into the earth, rushing through the tunnel at almost the speed of sound. If Aron thought that was ‘light’ Minhyun wasn’t going to trust him with estimations any time soon.

But the effect was perfectly in line with their intent. The force field stopped Aron’s power from affecting the block any further, but the material itself – and all its speed – went through unhindered. The door was open. The ground behind it was wrecked as well, turned into an even deeper hole, but that was secondary.

The agents certainly knew they were here, now.

“Alright boys,” Junior said. “We’re committed to this course of action. Let’s make this the last loop if we can.”


	14. Slayer of Dawn (4)

_[Some mention of blood at a few points in this chapter, but no full on gore.]_

The boys walked through the hole’s entrance and into the belly of the beast. All except Aron who was hesitant to put a single foot inside the coarse concrete tunnel.

“What- oh,” Junior said. “You don’t want to go in there, I’m guessing.”

Aron shifted from one leg to the other. “I’ve just… never been powerless. I really don’t like… um.”

“He’s terrified,” Ren interjected. “Absolutely petrified, really. Haven’t felt him so anxious before.”

“Hm, it’s understandable.” Junior looked back and forth. The longer they waited, the more time the enemy had to prepare. And the potential end of the loop was drawing near.

“Alright! Aron, stay behind. I suppose I can’t fault you for not wanting to go where you can’t use your ability.”

Minhyun kept looking back at the lone boys silhouette while on the way down. He had a strong desire to stay behind with him and comfort him. Aron had always seemed pretty sure of himself. Not the most socially apt, but just at the right place between shy and cocky. Minhyun committed to spending a few moments on telling Aron that he was still useful and worthy even without godlike powers.

He side-eyed Ren who of course could sense his intentions on some level. He wanted to ask if Ren would tell him specifically what Aron was feeling but realized that he had an easier way of making the boy on the surface feel like part of the team.

Minhyun re-linked the five of them. The distance to the surface barely strained his still developing ability.

“I can sense several people,” he sent telepathically, “all doing fairly frantic stuff. Our entrance must have caused a ruckus beyond what they were prepared to deal with.”

Junior responded. “Don’t worry. I can tell their next move as soon as they decide on one.”

“Good luck,” Aron sent.

Inside the bunker was a corridor not much different from the tunnel except for the fact that it wasn’t on a slope. It was illuminated by sharp halogen lights and had a few thick doors leading away. Minhyun felt reminded of the interior of a run-down submarine.

“Duck!” Junior shouted into the link as he shoved Ren to the side. Minhyun hid in a doorway which was conveniently sat back into the wall. Ren was similarly pressed against the opposing door while Junior stood in the middle of the corridor. Where did Baekho go? He must have shifted.

Following the minds of the boys in a high stress situation plus sensing the attacker's presence was taxing.

While Minhyun wasn’t able to see for himself how many men were attacking them, he could see through Junior that there had to be at least eight, with more coming from a door further ahead. It was always a bit difficult to tell what Junior saw in the present and what was part of his future-sense, but the boy himself seemed to have no trouble telling the difference.

With the bare minimum of movement Junior evaded the bullets of two rifles. He jumped, rotated and back flipped elegantly in exactly the right places to let the stream of metal fly a hairs width past him.

As the men were closing in he took the initiative and leap frogged over the first guy to step into the faces of two others at once. He had only just landed as he took to the air again, kicking the rifles from their owners’ hands.

It looked almost choreographed – as if the goons had agreed to lose beforehand. Junior knew their every move before their muscles had even received the signals from their brains. The fact that they were probably trained to follow certain standard tactics made their approach all the more predictable.

This all Minhyun gathered from passively observing the link and gave the information right over to Ren who didn’t have the comfort of knowing for sure that Junior wasn’t in any danger – unable to see through someone’s eyes the way Minhyun did.

Still, a boy with only regular physical limitations couldn’t expect to take on a total of ten heavy guards at once and never run out of stamina. It wasn’t long before Junior asked the others for help.

As if on cue, Baekho popped right behind the goons.

The white tiger walked straight into the melee battle and shot a ceaseless stream off his Twi orbs from his hands that he held in a ‘kamehameha’ position. The orbs cast strange shadows on the walls, revealing every crack and crease. He didn’t care to aim, he simply bombarded the group at one orb per second. Junior had no trouble evading. Several bones broke as the projectiles impacted.

Once Baekho was close enough, he kicked the nearest agent on the ground in the face, making him fly back and sending red splatters from the goon's split lips onto the concrete.

Minhyun decided that this was his call to action and stepped out. There was a rifle laying on the floor and one of the agents was slowly crawling towards it, blood pouring from his nostrils. Minhyun grabbed the weapon and hopped out of reach. He didn’t know how to use it but the fight was close range at this point anyway.

Sending the weapon’s thick end down on the crawling man’s face took care of him. The dream walker had never actually hit someone before. It was beyond weird. Faces were a lot softer than he would have thought.

Peripherally, Minhyun registered what Ren had been up to the entire time. Two Conmotes, taller than most humans with freakishly long necks, were cutting off the retreat of the battered agents and at the same time engaging the reinforcements that had come from the other end of the corridor. Those men hadn’t been in Minhyun’s mental reach before, so he figured they had been hiding in the houses above ground.

He felt a bit useless. Junior was directing Baekho through the link with short commands to make sure no agent of the void escaped, Ren took care of the rest and Minhyun… well, except for supplying the link he might as well have been with Aron right now.

Checking back with the boy on the surface he was told that several agents had been trying to engage them in front of the destroyed entrance, but of course there was no way to get past Aron as long as he was outside the force field blocking his powers.

 

***

 

The thin corridor was amess with red splatters, torn uniforms and even the occasional dismembered finger. Minhyun was careful not to step into the growing blood puddles. This was all a bit much to take in but it helped immensely to have Aron practically by his side, so to speak. The powerful boy had seen – and caused – his fair share of mayhem.

“The last room,” Junior sent, just as he had finished surveying the remaining bodies. The quartet walked slowly in that direction. They had mere minutes left before the end of the loop – or world or whatever. If they could stop it at all the opportunity would be here and now.

Minhyun heard Junior mumble through the link. The boy had just gained a random piece of information about the device blocking Aron. The generator for it was in the room directly to their left. They had a short mental conversation about whether they should break in and inspect or even destroy it but since time was of the essence, they figured there wasn’t much resistance left ahead and Aron was good to have on the surface in case more reinforcements showed up.

Junior turned the huge handle on the door at the end of the corridor and Baekho slammed his weight into it, aided by a Twi orb. The metal whined pitifully but gave way.

The room was a lot fuller that the sparse part of the bunker they had seen so far. Electronic equipment lined the walls, two man sat on stations left and right of the main attraction – the strange object the boys had only seen as blueprints.

Evidently the men in the room were either peaceful researchers or cowardly guards. They had their arms in the air and were pleading for their lives.

“Fine,” Junior said to them. “You stop doing what you’re doing and hand over all data you have. Is there anything in the works already? Any procedure you’ve set into motion? No? Alright, so what is all this?”

Ren had created a fear based Conmote for intimidation purposes. Minhyun found it fascinating how this particular kind of construct was basically self-sustaining as long as it kept giving people the creeps.

The researchers explained that they themselves had no idea what the artefact was and what they were even doing. All they had were orders for how to proceed. Inject 10 Watts of energy here, read some infrared output there. They weren’t even scientists, just goons with a knack for computers.

“What was your next order?” Junior sounded aggressive, but due to the link Minhyun could tell that it was a façade. Junior fully intended to spare their lives and take them into custody just in case they knew more than they currently let on.

A loud bang came from the ceiling.

Ren was shot in the back of the head and dropped dead.

Several more bullets hailed down from an automated machine gun swinging on a robotic arm. The remaining boys took shelter out of reach of the arm while Ren’s corpse received more and more holes.

Baekho collapsed next to Minhyun, blood flowing rapidly from a bullet wound in his leg.

Junior cursed. Again, he hadn’t foreseen events, which should have been impossible. And Ren had paid the price.


	15. Slayer of Dawn (5)

Minhyun bent down and tended to Baekho’s wounds. The injured boy was well alive so the same trick that had worked to save Junior would help him here.

Ren had dropped out of the link the moment he died. With nothing left to mend, Minhyun couldn’t fix him. He told all that to Junior – and Aron – while the warm light his hands emitted tied Baekho’s flesh together. He had no idea how he was doing it. It was very similar to creating a mindscape but for the cells in a body. With no will of their own to interfere he was free to tell them to stick together in any way he saw fit.

Junior’s thoughts were a mess. He tried to think through the guilt and confusion.

“Do you see that?” he sent to Minhyun. “That weapon on the ceiling. I had no idea it was going to fire. Not even a second before. How did they do that?”

Minhyun forced a link with the researchers and saw the object through their eyes. If they knew more it was possible they were focusing their attention on a detail he wasn’t aware of.

“Junior!” he sent back, “there is a button camera attached to the gun. And it’s moving. It’s not automatic. Someone’s watching us and directing the thing.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense either,” Junior sent. “If someone actively decided to shoot I should have known way earlier. If there was even a five percent chance _I should have known_.”

Baekho fired an orb at the contraption that had killed their friend and broke it loose. The gun hung down on cables, swinging back and forth. He spoke up, not bothering to use the link. “What do we do now?”

Junior couldn’t even bring himself to look into the direction of his dead friend. “We were careless. We’re not making that mistake again.”

He shouted at the researchers. “Whatever your orders where, carry them out. Go on! Do what you were supposed to.”

The man stared at him in shock, clearly not sure what to make of it. Minhyun assumed they didn’t know it was going to reset everything the way Junior claimed it would.

It took a bit more yelling but eventually they complied, sitting back down at their computers.

Junior watched over their shoulders making sure they weren’t doing anything unexpected. Meanwhile Minhyun and the healed Baekho stood around aimlessly.

The grim determination on the leaders face kept them from speaking up. And if the time loops were real the reset would fix what had happened. Minhyun had to admit this all seemed horribly wrong and the faint comfort of expecting it to be deleted from time itself was enticing.

He had doubted the whole thing from the beginning but Junior seemed truly sure of himself.

A minute later the last key on the computer was pressed and the eldritch device came to life, glowing and vibrating. Strange charges flowed along the surface. The trepidations traveled into the ground and air.

The lights flickered.

Minhyun wondered if-

 

***

 

It was the 27th of March and they had made no progress. The end was 5 hours away. Every further lead had turned out a dead end.

_He was still connected to everyone except Ren._

_That was impossible, he had no memory of establishing a connection._

An avalanche of images assaulted his mind through Junior’s consciousness. It had to be the exact moment Junior received the knowledge. One loop, two, three... Over and over they had lived through this day and came so close the last time.

“I saw it, too!” he sent to Junior a few rooms over. “I woke up with the connection intact. We were still linked when the thing went off.”

The leader took a moment to sort out his thoughts before sending “This time we nuke them.”

 

***

 

The flight was different that Minhyun remembered through Junior’s second hand memories. Or third hand since they were the memories of a Junior from a timeline that didn’t exist.

With two boys equally convinced and detailed data about the bunker in Japan it was a very different conversation in the helicopter. For one thing, they were accompanied by a small army in more helicopters flying alongside theirs.

“That’s why you can’t see a future? Cause we’re on repeat forever and ever?” Baekho asked.

“Yep.”

Now that Minhyun didn’t doubt the validity of the loop claim anymore it was the tiger who was the slowest to accept the premise.

“And Ren died?”

“That’s what I told you,” Junior said patiently.

“Just checking. It all sounds a bit crazy.”

Ren himself didn’t speak up. Minhyun had to make sure he hadn’t accidentally kicked the boy out of the link network. But no, Ren was just keeping his thoughts to himself.

Minhyun let him think in peace and sent towards Aron instead. They were sitting next to each other which kept them for making eye contact. Stupid, bulky helmets. “How do you feel?”

“My head is spinning but I’m fine," the American sent. "Spent the whole week hoping we’d find a way to prevent the end of the world and it looks like we’re getting there. Even if – as you said – it took us a few tries.”

Aron smiled, Minhyun could tell, even if facial expressions didn't travel through the link.

“Say,” Minhyun sent, “if we hadn’t found anything to do, how would you have spent your last few hours on earth.”

There was a silence that lasted a bit too long.

“I would have…spent it with you. _You guys_ , I mean.”

“Right.”

They fell into silence again, trying to sit comfortably in the crowded aerial vehicle.

After they were past the halfway point of their flight route, Aron poked Minhyun’s mind through the link anew. “Hey um, you know… After this is over… There’s this small bakery right around the corner from our headquarters, but I’ve never been there.”

Minhyun lifted his hand and put it down on Aron’s thigh. The other boy jumped a little but grabbed the offered hand, squeezing it once before letting both their hands rest between them.

“Sure, Aron. I’ll check it out with you.”

If only he could have turned his head far enough to see past the clunky headwear. Minhyun bet his companion was blushing like never before.

 

***

 

Junior was acting like a general commanding troop movements. Which was exactly what he was doing.

Teams of heavily armed operatives swarmed the evacuated suburb and stormed the houses Junior knew to be hiding places of agents of the void in waiting.

As Aron formed a huge titanium cylinder from dirt, Minhyun got an unshakable sense of déjà-vu. Of course he knew he had seen this before in a different life, but the feeling of repetition was uncanny to the extreme.

This time they wouldn’t tolerate going in underpowered. The target was the generator Junior knew to be hidden in great depth at a spot he could pinpoint precisely.

Aron caused a minor earthquake in the region as he slammed the superheated metal block into the ground with hypersonic speed, giving it constant momentum all the way until it reached the Anti-Aron shield.

Everyone who was inside the bunker had their ear drums torn by the entry. The generator was turned paper thin and dragged farther into the earth. Every light in the underground facility went out just as the explosion made everybody go deaf.

Baekho shifted and went down through the hole, flying elegantly in Twi. He carried a few smoke grenades. At the bottom he didn’t bother to pop back since the door to the corridor had burst open from the pressure anyway. There was no point in seeing whether or not the staff members were leaving their quarters.

He threw the grenades into the corridor – which made them pop into reality – and floated back up. Popping out on the surface himself made everyone except Junior jump in surprise.

“Mission accomplished.”

Junior didn’t look at him. “You mean ‘mission accomplished, Sir’.”

“Nope.”

“I’ll teach you, one of these days.”

The leader furrowed his brows, but Minhyun could guess it wasn’t because of the white tiger as Junior’s eyes widened in shock a moment later. “Wait. _No_!”

“What is it?” Minhyun asked, seeing the panic rise in Junior’s face.

“They advanced the schedule. The end of the loop is minutes away. We were supposed to have two hours left. Is there another device somewhere else? Oh please, no.”

Minhyun remembered the last time and suggested “We could ask the researchers. Maybe they are in contact with the other station wherever it is.”

“Good idea, we- Wait. Aron?”

“Yeah?”

“Is the power out down there?”

The American used his ability to tell charged particles how to move to see if there were any. “…Actually there is still current flowing.”

“Ha!” Junior raised his hands in triumph. “A backup generator. Naturally.  Aron destroy it.”

“Don’t treat me like a weapon you can fire.”

“Aron destroy it, _please_?”

The powerful boy claimed through the link that he was overloading the electric lines in the bunker. Would this be the end of the ‘end of the world’?

Junior yelled incoherently through the link. There was an impending catastrophe. Without wasting a second Minhyun mentally yelled at Aron, vaguely seeing what disturbed Junior.

“ _Future! We all die! Protect us!_ ”

The explosion lifted the ground as if hell was opening. The first flame shot from the hole Aron’s cylinder had punched into the bunker. Then various rifts in the streets and gardens around formed, letting hot smoke escape, like a volcano opening up underneath the town.

The world went ablaze.

The spot of ground on which the five boys stood was left unscorched, kept cool and quiet by Aron’s power. Around them, the explosion raged as walls of tempestuous fire.

As the heat outside their protective bubble died down, revealing a blackened and scarred landscape, the ground sank underneath them. It was again Aron’s doing that kept them save as he transmuted the loose earth into steel. They landed hard but only after falling a mere arm’s length.

Houses burned, holes were still opening and the smoke darkened the sky. Nuest and their operatives were of course the only survivors. Fortunately the area had been void of civilians.

Ash descended like snowflakes.

Junior dropped to his knees, sobbing.

“We have a future,” he mumbled. “We have our future back. I can see the stars again.”


	16. Healing Time - B

George Washington had opened a bistro on a remote island to discourage the native tribes from hunting sharks for food and Minhyun – camouflaged as an old, native woman of course – had to admit that the former president’s pasta salad was pretty good.

He was used to Ren missing from his own dreams. The boy seemed to dream mainly in omniscient perspective. Those kind of people were always difficult to engage but most fascinating to observe. As Minhyun had wandered the landscape he had found a whole lot of remnants from earlier phases of the dream. Either Ren was really concerned about the world’s shark population or there was an underlying issue Minhyun couldn’t quite figure out.

But sometimes dreams just made no sense.

He had never officially asked anyone for permission to enter their dreams. It wasn’t as if he learned much about them. And it certainly wasn’t as if he tried to act against their best interest. Dreamscape walking was just what he did naturally when he fell asleep. If he was honest he didn’t know if he would have been capable of having his own dreams anymore.

He walked into the direction of the next dream, leaving the blue lagoon, the hungry natives and the American founding father’s bistro behind.

 

***

 

Baekho had the most nightmares out of anyone in the group, no competition. Minhyun helped him along every few nights. This time the tiger was trapped in an ancient castle. There was a murder mystery going on but Minhyun hadn’t been there at the start of the dream so he had no idea what the endgame was.

He let his hand wander over the cold stone walls. Baekho dreamed impressively realistic textures. After roaming about the place for a little while to get a feeling for the layout, he focused on Baekho and turned around, teleporting straight into a spooky attic via dream logic.

“Minhyun! Thank goodness you’re here. Can you light those for me?”

Baekho’s dream avatar accepted his presence without issue. The dream-walker scanned the environment and saw the candles the dreamer wanted lit. Once Minhyun had made his way around the place, lighting every candle in sight, Baekho was also finished arranging the small statues strewn around the room.

Together their shadows formed the image of a dancing ballerina. Impossible, since the light came from all directions and if there had been shadows they wouldn’t have overlapped to a silhouette on the ground.

Dreams didn’t care about physics.

Baekho seemed quite excited by the progress. The dancer’s fingers were pointing to a floorboard that contained the next hint in to the mystery. Minhyun didn’t get to see the hint, the dream skipped over that part of the narrative.

The next clue was in the basement, stuffed into an alcove behind hollow tapestry. Minhyun didn’t care for the final hint and walked out. It was clear that this wasn’t a nightmare Baekho needed to be rescued from. The boy’s mind would make up an excuse why Minhyun was no longer there. Or perhaps supplant it with a dream version of himself.

Junior was right adjacent and much more pleasant to visit.

Lush fabrics, warm lighting and cozy furniture dominated. Ren was there, too, getting fed grapes by the leader directly from a bottomless cornucopia.

Minhyun camouflaged himself as one of the many porcelain amphorae lying around.

The two boys giggled and kissed. Somehow they both turned shirtless without moving. Junior’s kisses went further and further down.

Welp. Time for Minhyun to leave.

 

***

 

An unusually disturbing dream.

Aron sat in a chair, staring intently at a white glowing screen that showed some sort of schedule. The writing wasn’t legible since Aron’s attention wasn’t on its content.

But then where was his attention?

Minhyun walked around the boy. The room was otherwise empty. The area around the dim room Aron had dreamed up for himself was filled with only a few slowly disintegrating remnants hinting at the story that led to the arrangement.

Sure, people dreamed boring stuff all the time, but usually the brain skipped over periods of inactivity and fast forwarded to stuff that mattered to the dreamer.

Minhyun did his best to figure out what was happening. But Aron simply didn’t move or do anything. He was as if he had entered a trance.

Wait! Was this-?

Minhyun hadn’t seen something like this in a long time.

Unmistakably, Aron was having a dream within a dream.

But how to get in? Minhyun focused on the screen and hoped for the best. He was sucked in a second later. His surroundings changed dramatically.

A massive library. Shelves full of books. Shelves _made_ from books. Sprawling outward in twisting spirals, held together by wooden outgrowths, overflowing with calligraphy.

And above it all, blocking a starlit sky, an indescribably ugly beast. Its tentacles reaching down in futile attempts to grab onto the library’s highest extensions.

“Woah!” Aron noticed him. “What are you doing in the archives?”

Minhyun was stumped. He had been too dizzy to adjust. Usually he walked carefully and deliberately into a new part of the dreamscape. Getting pulled in was a new experience. He had failed to think of a camouflage.

“Oh, Aron, I’m…”

“You’re not supposed to be here. Only I can access the archive program. Is the damage from the Beyond One that bad already?”

The American boy gestured upward where the massive creature slapped entire sections of the library into the abyss. Then the look of an epiphany spread on his face.

“If you’re here… _I’m dreaming aren’t I_? But shouldn’t realizing that wake me up?”

Wow, that had never happened before. Minhyun figured he had nothing to lose.

“Yes, you are dreaming. And now that you’re aware of that it has become a lucid dream. You’d wake up if this was a normal dream but you’re in a bit deeper than that.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Anything you want. Try to fly.”

“How?”

Minhyun took to the air. It was simple for him. He did it all the time to look at dreams from above when he didn’t want to get noticed. Aron had a bit more difficulties. At first he held onto an overhanging buttress. He pulled himself up in a way that wasn’t physically possible – with his torso becoming parallel to the ground. He was barely touching the bar.

“Now let go.”

Aron pushed himself away and floated a bit. “How do I control this?”

“Have you never flown in a dream before?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Try something else.”

It only took a moment for Aron to visualize what he wanted. Lightning forked from his hand, slamming into the terrible being above them and shattered it into millions of sparks. It was a lot easier for Aron to do things that he could also do in real life.

 

***

 

They flew.

Hand in hand Minhyun guided Aron across continents of his mind’s making. Always drifting, never letting go, they explore the pinnacles of Aron’s inner world.

Savannas, where lions roamed. Ice fields, where penguins bred. The deep ocean, where whales sang to them. Forests, where birds of ceaselessly changing colors flocked around the boys. Oases teeming with life. Lagoons filled with galaxies. Caves of milk and honey. Cities of glass and light. Infinite cathedrals.

They came to rest on top of the H in the ‘Hollywood’ sign, back in Aron’s hometown. The view would have been breathtaking if Aron had focused on it enough to let it coalesce. But as it stood he only had eyes for his companion. Their little world was big enough for them.

“Will I forget this when I wake?”

Minhyun had feared the moment they had to go back to real life. He hadn’t expected Aron to bring it up.

“Most likely.”

“Is there anything that can be done about that?”

“Actually…”

Minhyun slammed Aron’s chest to make him topple over backwards. The shock was enough to drop him out of his dream – the inner one at least.

Back in the empty room the boys were still looking at the computer screen. It didn’t show anything anymore. Aron was still sitting in his chair, rubbing his eyes.

“Woah, Minhyun. You won’t believe what I just dreamt.”

“Sorry, not done.”

Minhyun kicked the chair and made Aron fall backwards again, forcing him awake.

The boy dropped out of the dreamscape and his dream crumbled. Minhyun was catapulted back into Junior’s. He forced himself to wake up immediately when he saw what was going on there. No way was he getting any of that stuff on his dream-self’s clothes.


	17. Dearest of the Suns (1)

In rare circumstances, feelings were simple. Being enraged to the blood, being overjoyed with delight, fearing for one’s life. Those were all-consuming states of mind. But ninety-nine percent of the time, people had these foggy mess inside them, mixing a dozen – sometimes contradictory – emotions and very few of those were easily expressed.

So Ren had researched other languages and salvaged anything useful to make sense of the chaos.

It was a routine day at the headquarters and he leaned against a wall in the cafeteria, waiting for a table to empty, pretending to read a trashy sci-fi novel from a tablet.

Three men – guards on break – were engaged in a card game and they were betting real money. All had constantly rising levels of _pleonexia_ – the insatiable desire to acquire what belongs to others. But there was so much more.

The one with the scar on his cheek had a tendency to analyze his happiness until it turned to misery. Every now and then he would try to take part in the conversation but was quickly struck by _exulansis_ – a tendency to give up on reciting one’s experience to others because they never related.

Opposite him was a tall and lanky one who seemed to be playing the most risk averse. _Monachopsis_ – the elusive but persistent feeling of not belonging. Baekho had felt like that for a long time until it got better fast recently. Ren assumed the tall guy was relatively new and hadn’t found his role but perhaps he just never learned how to fit in.

Thirdly there was an old man who wore the badge of a general, putting him in the highest rank inside the compound. The ranks were purely a matter of internal structure. The organization wasn’t the military. The man had a bad case of _rückkehrunruhe_ – coming back from a great trip but soon beginning to forget everything about it, even the best parts slipping from awareness.

It was strange to know that the general had been on vacation recently and was probably on the verge of developing Alzheimer’s without having spoken to him once.

Ren wasn’t too keen on digging into other people’s lives. Especially because it gave him a sense of _sonder_ – the realization that every passer-by has a complex and vivid inner life and the full range of human experiences. Or maybe it was _occhiolism_ – being aware of one’s smallness in the grand scheme of things.

Hard to say. Ren couldn’t read his own emotions. He had to do it the old fashioned way, by actually feeling them and exercising some introspection. With wasn’t too satisfying. Therefore he spent a lot of time reading other’s despite not caring about them.

That was maybe also something he felt. _Liberosis_ – the desire to care less.

But there was a practical reason as well. He had to learn how to use less coherent feelings for combat. Even from subtle ones something useful could be made, if he kept his own panic under control. Perhaps not yet an entire Conmote, but more than nothing.

 

***

 

Ren felt Junior approach before the boy had even reached the doorframe. As Junior strolled into the room he forgot what he had been planning to do. That happened to people a lot more than they let on.

Ren couldn’t help but chuckle. Seeing someone forget stuff always gave him a little bit of _schadenfreude_ – pleasure derived from other’s misfortune. Especially if they tried to confidently play over it the way Junior did.

When Junior laid eyes on Ren he made his way across the room and plopped down next to him, looking up. For a second Ren toyed with the idea of feigning business and leaving the boy alone on the ground.

But the crush Junior had on him was annoyingly persistent. And being able to sense how he was so honestly adored made Ren feel a tiny bit responsible. There was that _liberosis_ again.

“So,“ Junior began what was no doubt his next transparent attempt at flirting. “I got some new games.”

“Oh, please.”

“We could go to my room and-“

Ren huffed. “Is that the ‘I’ll show you my stamp collection’ of the modern age? Come on now. You’re not the only one who gets boners around me. A few pretty high ranking operative here have-“

He trailed off with a vague hand gesture, not actually willing to get specific.

There was an emotion he didn’t sense very often. _Andronitis_ – frustration about how long it takes to get to know someone. Junior had a deep and innocent desire to know more about Ren. Not to project some ideal picture and get mad when Ren didn’t turn out ‘submissive and always cutesy’ like his suitors over the years had expected him to be because of his looks.

Bitterness was another thing Ren probably felt a lot.

Junior was not deterred. “If you really don’t like gaming, we could… um, uh… erm”

It was adorable how the usually confident leader struggled. Pathetic, yes. But also adorable. Maybe if Ren just indulged him he’d get over that little crush of his. There was a chance it would ruin their work relationship but whatever. Ren decided not to care. Looking into the future was Junior’s domain after all.

“Fine.”

“Wha-“ Junior looked up.

“Let’s go to your place.”

“Yes? Yes! I mean, good, sure. Let’s go.”

A whirlwind of excitement swept through the slender boy. He tried to get up, holding out his hand so Ren could help him get off the floor. But the empath decided a demonstration of power was necessary and walked off without so much as looking back.

 

***

 

“Shouldn’t you have known my answer beforehand?”

They were making their way into the part of the complex where all the boys had their dorms. They were alone since Aron was on a mission to capture more agents of the void while Minhyun was teaching Baekho how to meditate down in the gym.

Junior shrugged. “The chances fluctuated wildly before you answered. Remember, I can only see your decision ahead of time once you made it. I see actions, not thoughts like you.”

“What? I don’t see thoughts either.”

“I saw you wow a bunch of people with what you knew about them.”

Now it was on Ren to shrug. “I make educated guesses. And I really only do it to creep out anyone I want to stay away from me.”

“You’ve never done it to me.”

“I… guess not.”


	18. Dearest of the Suns (2)

_[Mature content for most of the chapter. Nothing graphic or explicit.]_

The leader of Nuest had a room the same size as everybody elses but it showed the signs of being inhabited for much longer. It was a home more than a dorm. The boy was orderly enough for a young man but not truly _neat_. There was that one chair every person seems to have on their home. The one covered with clothes that weren’t worn enough to wash yet.

Stars stuck to the ceiling. Little five pointed glow-in-the-dark stickers. Ren wasn’t sure but their arrangement seemed to be modeled after actual constellations. He wondered which one’s they represented. And which one was the leader’s fa-

“The sun,” Junior said.

“Huh?”

“Sorry. Got a bit eager," the boy clarified. "That’s what you were going to ask. Which one my favorite star is? It’s the sun.”

“How so?”

“Well, it gives us warmth and life and-“

“That’s ridiculous,” Ren said. “It’s the closest. That’s an unfair advantage. Your selection process is unscientific. You should correct for your bias rather than indulge it.”

“I don’t think being close to the sun is something I’d like to correct. Rather cold further out there.”

Ren used his murder glare but it didn’t make Junior smile less, only raise an eyebrow.

As the silence settled the boy with the crush looked up to the ceiling as if he was stargazing. Ren figured he truly didn’t know how dorky an impression that made. There was a shelf full of teenage boy stuff like anime figurines and a dusty – and kind of gross – bug collection, but mostly games. Some of the things belonged in a child’s room.

“Junior, how long have you been with the organization?”

“It… it was kind of built around me.”

“What?”

Looking off to the side, Junior signed. “It all began many years ago when-“ He trailed off. His emotions shifted towards the negative end of the spectrum as he sorted through confusion and insecurity. 

This was not how Ren had intended to make the boy feel, so he interrupted. “Exposition. How boring. I’d rather play your stupid video games.”

Ren slapped the boy in the chest with the back of his hand. Junior flinched appropriately even though he had certainly foreseen the event. Why had Junior not moved out of the way of the playful attack? Ren's empathy sensed something interesting enough to test it.

He shot forward and pinched Junior’s nipple through his button up.

“Hey, stop it!”

Junior reacted the way he was supposed to, protecting his tormented and no doubt sensitive spot. But the emotion that rose in him betrayed his actions – fiercely burning lust.

It was hard to say if the boy would be more or less annoying if they were to…

Ren had to admit it had been a while. And for all his faults this Junior guy was terribly cute plus the idea of sensing exactly what a person felt during sex was a massively fascinating prospect.

There was a look somewhere between panic and ecstasy flickering across Junior’s face as he clearly read the change in his future.

“Well,” Ren said, “I suppose you just realized what could happen. Now that I’ve made my… _decision_.”

“There’s a… very high chance that-“ Junior swallowed hard.

“And you know you can’t do anything about it. Even if you know it’s coming.”

“Don’t intend to.”

Their lips met too fast. The kiss was clumsy and sloppy and rough. Ren didn’t have all that much practice but he briefly wondered if Junior had ever kissed anyone. The boy had been locked away in the organization for years after all. That was a lot of pent up horniness he sensed.

There was no good spot to put their hands. Both boys kept grabbing and holding onto whatever they could – spine, shoulder blades, hips, neck, hair, face. They tumbled towards the bed incurring minor hickeys and small scratches as their lips and fingers met skin.

Ren let his hands wander along the slender sides and down onto the perky hips of the other boy. Once all the way down he grabbed a handful of crotch, causing Junior to make something between a squeal and a grunt.

Just as Junior was chewing on his ear, Ren hit the bed frame with his knee and froze. The pain was considerable but all that did was make his moan louder than intended.

They tore each other’s shirts off before dropping onto the mattress. Ren’s shirt lost a button.

Junior’s impressively lithe, evenly tanned body made Ren forget all remaining reservations.

“You know what’s coming next, don’t you?” Ren asked.

“Yes,” Junior said with a huge grin.

Delicate Conmotes materialized from the very essence of lust, dimly pink and weightless. The two faceless beings enwrapped Junior’s wrists and restrained him to the bedframe.

Ren was sitting on top of Junior, with the leader looking up, to Ren and the faux sky.

“You know what?” Junior said and there was a fondness welling up inside him Ren could sense as clear as day.

“Huh? What?”

“I found a new favorite star. One closer to me than the sun.”

Their eyes didn’t break contact for a moment. Their heavy breaths synchronized. Very slowly, Ren leaded down.

Junior continued. “I can’t see that far into the future, but I know for sure we’ll be the greatest power couple. We’re going to make everybody jealous. We’re going to be- _under attack_!”

There was a deafening explosion outside and the building trembled from the impact.

 

***

 

Ren held both their shirts as they rushed along the corridor since Junior was busy with the phone. Minhyun was forcibly linking with everybody he could reach and declaring state of emergency, which meant somebody had told him to do that which meant emergency protocols had been enacted which meant this attack was real and huge and everything was terrible.

They rushed through a corridor with windows and the precog looked out to where no threat was visible in the present.

“Forty men.” Junior yelled into the phone. “I see that many coming. But their movements are absurdly hard to predict. They have automatic weapons and heavy artillery and there’s a ninety percent chance they’d use it if you engage. So don’t. I repeat, don’t engage. Evacuate and they won’t go further in. Sixty percent. No, fifty. No, six- Argh. This has never been so hard.”

They arrived at the elevator and Junior struggled into his torn shirt. He turned to Ren to make sure he was listening while he kept speaking into the phone. “I think they found a way around my ability. That’s why I didn’t foresee it. And why I can’t pin them down any better. I’m no help. We’re screwed.”

A second explosion shook the foundations of the building and gave Ren a headache and the elevator stopped between floors and the lights went out and they were plunged into darkness and everything was even more terrible than before.


	19. Dearest of the Suns (3)

Illuminated only by two phones’ flashlights, the elevator’s insides felt a whole lot narrower.

“Who do we call?” Junior though out loud. “Who’s not busy? Why did they have to strike just when Aron isn’t arou- _They knew_! They knew when Aron would be away. We have more moles.”

One person was enough for a single Conmote under the right circumstances. Junior having worked himself into a nervous frenzy was pretty good as far as circumstances went.

Ren materialized a jittery, smoky-gray figure with the proportions of a goblin who had fallen through a meat grinder. It would suffice.

The ugly creature dug its stubby claws into the slit between the door halves and pushed. Ren could only hope the leader's emotional state would last long enough or Nervousness would fade with a job half done.

Even the outside was without electricity. As the door opened for them, natural lighting fell into the cabin from a faraway window. They were stuck exactly at the half way point between floors

“After you,” Junior said, pointing down. The Conmote ran out of juice and vanished.

Ren did his best to fit through the opening between elevator floor and subceiling. The fall would be a little too much since the rooms in this part of the complex were fairly high. He quickly built another construct from Junior’s impatience. The long fingers of a hasty demon helped Ren down and did the same for Junior seconds later.

Impatience was dismissed just as Minhyun poked both boy’s consciousness.

“Status?” Junior sent.

“They broke through the wall in the north wing causing a lot of ruckus, but for now they’re just securing the perimeter very slowly and shooting at everyone they see. We evacuated like you said, but there are already casualties. And, Junior…”

“Yes.”

“I can’t access them. Their minds are, I don’t know who to express it better, too primitive.”

Junior groaned in frustration. “Not you too. Something’s blinding my future sight. We’ll be right there. Is Baekho with you?”

“Right here,” Baekho himself sent through the link. “Staying out of trouble, but I flew over their stuff in Twi and they have a tank. Not a big one, but it’s definitely a tank. Really futuristic looking. It's about to drive in through the hole they made.”

 

***

 

The operative that awaited them was incidentally the unhappy one with the scar on his cheek Ren had seen minutes before. He showed them the feed from the security cameras the soldiers had connected to the emergency generator.

On the other side of the wall was the enemy. Fireproof steel doors separated Nuest from the adversary. The invaders had entered the building through the area they had destroyed. The feed showed a lot of broken walls and still settling clouds of smoke.

Multiple burly man in armored full body suits kept watch over the rubble the initial attack had turned the building into. One wall was gone entirely and the roof had come down. Just outside was the tank Baekho had mentioned. It was a sleek design, more armored battle robot that traditional war machinery. A turret rotated on its top side, but it was no weapon, it was an antenna. Possibly autonomous.

“I’ll try to steal one, “Baekho said over the mental link.

“One what?” Ren asked.

“One guy. I can grab one and drag him into Twi and then pop out with him on our side.”

Junior grumbled. “Sounds like you’d expose yourself to them, though.”

“Don’t worry I know how to wait for a perfect moment. They’re wandering around a bit, so eventually one will be far enough from the herd.”

Minhyun joined the duo physically, arriving from where ever he had been. The three of them, plus present operatives watched the feed where Baekho popped out behind a wall. Over the next minute he occasionally vanished when about to be seen, always making his way towards the troop.

As he worked his way closer without being discovered Ren dared to breathe again. He hadn’t even known he had been holding his breath.

“No,” whispered Junior. Then he screamed into the link. “Get out of there!”

Without any visible changes the white tiger froze on the spot. Then he dropped to the ground, unmoving.

Minhyun reacted. “He’s still alive. I can still link with him but he won’t wake up.”

Sleeping gas. That explained the full body coverage. The suits had breathing masks built in.

The armored men assembled around the boy’s unconscious body and one of them threw him over his shoulder. Ren’s mind raced. If he attacked now with as many Conmotes as he could muster… but someone might be able to shoot Baekho in time. What to do?

He tested the waters to see what emotion he would use if the need was to arise. _But there were none._

“Junior!”

“Yes?”

“They don’t have emotions.”

“ _What_?”

“I can’t sense them. There’s nothing.”

The leader bit his lower lip almost until it bled. He was so stressed he had begun to sweat while just standing there with his shirt open.

On the screen they could see all the men converge around Baekho who had been dropped back onto the ground. The invaders took their weapons from their holsters and – _laid them on the ground_.

“W-what are they doing?” Minhyun mumbled without getting an answer.

After the guards had disarmed themselves they stepped back and the tank/robot vehicle moved closer to the broken wall. It entered the room, coming further towards Baekho.

An opening appeared on its outside, uncovering a small device. It wasn’t a weapon either, it was a speaker. A feedback sound echoed through the building as the speaker activated. From the other side of the wall, they could hear a deep voice speak. Loud, slow and clear. It was artificially distorted to obscure the voice of whoever was speaking.

“Junior of Nuest. I wish to speak to you. The other powers may accompany you, but nobody else. I assurance your slumbering friend's safety so long as you comply.”


	20. Dearest of the Suns (4)

It took two minutes of preparation. Junior got a small microphone and an earpiece. That way everyone in the building who had a significant rank would be able to listen in without Minhyun having to expend all his energy on dozens of links.

Ren feared his knees were going to give in. His heart had refused to slow down. He kept rubbing his hands on his jeans but his palms didn’t get any less sweaty.

Three boys stood in front of the massive steel door as it opened. Thirty of the forty armored agents turned to them, bodies tense, ready to pick their weapons back up.

Aron was still one hour away, no doubt being flown back at high speed. Ren promised himself he’d never let them split up again.

With every step the idea felt worse. Even though he couldn’t see the agent’s eyes behind their armor Ren knew their gaze rested on him. He was the only one left with an ability that could do damage. But there was no way to create enough Conmotes to engage the enemy troops.

Junior spoke with a voice that sounded a lot more confident than he could feel. Probably because he was shouting.

“Who are you!?”

Ren and Minhyun took their positions to his left and right. The speaker crackled a bit before they heard the voice again.

“I am the shadow that has been following you for a long time. Over the years there were many times when I thought about approaching you and your secret little world domination organization. Sometimes I considered if I would have to stop you before you held too much power. Other times, I though you should better be left in the dark about me. I tend to prefer to err on the side of caution and so you never learned of my existence.”

Ren sent through the link between the three of them. “What does he mean by world domination? And what power?”

Junior ignored him, instead addressing the tank again. “Alright, Mister ‘Shadow’. What changed that you had to go to such measures?”

“Them! Your friends. When they entered the picture I had to reconsider many things. And all of the sudden you began to foil my plans. You did barely any damage and all you found were my letterbox companies I had set up for exactly such events. I admit I became careless but you truly didn’t appear too competent.”

“You… you’re behind the agents of the void.”

The Shadow was silent for a second before he spoke with great condescension. “A cult of fanatics I set up to do some dirty work for me and serve as a distraction. Give drug money to a few addicts at the bottom rung of society and tell them they can earn more with simple work. Then radicalize them. You of all people should know how easily humans are forced into a path you set out for them.”

Ren sent to Junior again with increased urgency. “What does he mean? Did you manipulate anyone?”

Even this time Junior ignored him and took a half step towards the tank. “Get to the point, Shadow. What do you want?”

“Simple,” the Shadow answered right away. “Information. I assume you did not predict my attack since you were so terribly underprepared. The moment I learned about the extent of your ability from one of my spies I desperately searched for a way to escape you – to be the one person whose actions you can’t control. Long ago I found a way that I thought would make it possible for me to stay hidden at little cost.”

Ren didn’t bother to ask again, but there were now more questions burning in his head reserved for Junior than for the Shadow.

Minhyun hadn’t said or sent anything the entire time, but now he addressed the Shadow directly, cutting off the leader. “Why are you doing this? If you have spies everywhere anyway why attack?”

“The incident at test lab three in Japan,” the speaker let hear. “It went against everything I thought I knew about you all. For a month you make no progress in even finding my test facility and then, hours before the final test run you show up with perfect knowledge of its architecture and wreck everything. I know things just ‘pop’ into your head sometimes but not that much. Never that much. _Do you have any idea how terrifying you are_?!”

Ren felt double the goosebumps. His and Minhyun’s. The Shadow was clearly a horrific sociopathic monster, but Junior hadn’t denied a single accusation. Not out loud and not to them confidentially.

“Hey Ren,” Minhyun sent, “I’ve established a private link only between us two. Do you think there’s something to all this stuff about world domination?”

“No idea,” Ren sent back, “but we shouldn’t waver in our support for Junior. We still have to get Baekho back. Questions later.”

“Alright. Going back to three way link now.”

The man behind the speaker was still ranting. “I had to abandon an invaluable artefact. Do you know how much you harmed humanity? Do you even care?”

“I said,” Junior shouted, “get to the _point_.”

The Shadow sighed. “I want to know how you did it. I need to know what you can do. Maybe I have no other choice but to accept your world order and submit. I know it would be a bit late to make amends, but I would be willing to offer something in return. Perhaps we can become allies. Uneasy ones, admittedly, but still allies.”

“What do you offer?” Junior asked.

“To tell you how I’ve evaded you. How my attack could be so successful.”

Ren could feel the excitement radiate off the boy. It was the first time Junior addressed them through the link, looking back and forth between them. “What do you say? The more we know about him the better. It’s not like we can replicate the time loop, so I don’t see what we’d be giving away.”

Minhyun nodded while thinking at the duo. “Yes, but the priority is to get Baekho back alive. Don’t forget that. I’d rather concede any negotiation than loose him.”

“Same here,” Ren added.

“Got it,” Junior sent.

He turned back towards the tank. “We accept, but you go first. How come I can’t know your movements ahead of time?”

“Seeing as I have one of your friends as leverage I feel confident that you intend to keep your side of the bargain, so…fine. First, there is your impeccable sense of past events. I went to great length making sure nobody you met had valuable information about me to trigger. Then there is your annoying ability to conjure facts out of thin air. But they are rarely useful so I only had to avoid triggers there, too. Now, the future is a different beast.”

Ren had spent the last minute estimating how many shields he could produce with just the three of them available for emotional fuel. It would be much easier than creating full Conmotes. The lynchpin was whether those shields could extend all the way to Baekho and if they would be able to get away without coming under fire. There were too many variables.

The Shadow continued. “You can only see things that happen with five percent probability or more. The key was to keep even things I have decide upon under five percent. In the beginning I used dice. Once I had confirmed that you are blind to small events I camouflage in this manner, I moved on to random number generators. Then to a complex quantum computer based system that connects all my-“

“But how do you _do_ it?” Junior asked.

“When I decide on a thing, say, to attack the compound here, I set up everything necessary. Then I activate a program that gives me a random number between one and a hundred every minute. Which means there is no set point in the future where the probability of my attack is greater than one percent.”

Ren had to admit that was smart. And scarily simple. And even knowing about it gave them no way to work around it.

“It does mean,” the Shadow finished, “that I have to keep my agents ready for hours potentially while the computer rolls the dice. Only when I get the predetermined number I picked, I’ll order an attack. That’s the moment you know what’s going to happen. But by then I have set up all my preparations.”

“Ren,” Minhyun sent, “That’s how you died in the time loop. The gun was using a random number generator to see if it should shoot or not. The probability of you dying went from one to a hundred percent in the moment it happened. Unpredictably.”

It was uncomfortable enough to know he had been shot to death in an alternate timeline, but knowing that it had been due to a quantum computer spitting out numbers made it even squickier.

Now Junior spoke calmly. “Your experiment in Japan. Do you know what I did?”

“No,” the Shadow said, “How should I? You ruined it.”

“It created a time loop for five hours before the experiment.” Junior was beaming with self-satisfaction. They were doing what the Shadow had done to them. Giving out great information that didn’t help at all. “I had knowledge from the future because I was there. I optimized for best results. But then you blew it all up and the looping ended.”

“…If that is true, Junior my boy, why haven’t I seen more damage to me?”

“W-what do you mean?”

What _did_ he mean? There was only one facility responsible for the time loop. They had done maximum damage, didn’t they? Minhyun didn’t know what to think either.

“Haven’t you,” the Shadow said, “spent loop after loop doing things you otherwise couldn’t due to secrecy and moral concerns? You said you optimized for results, but what have you found out? You had the option to do anything – _anything_ – with no consequences and you did no more than take away that opportunity from yourself.”

The Shadow laughed. It wasn’t the laughter of a villain, just the breathy chuckling of a man who wanted to be serious but couldn’t quite keep it in.

There was a heavy silence upon the scene. Ren had no idea how to come back from that devastating realization.

It was the Shadow who broke through the quiet. “It’s been lovely to chat with you. I’m being informed that Aron is almost in reach and I don’t intend to lose all my troops. If you will, perhaps consider joining forces with me. This offer is for all of you. Even those currently not listening. It should be obvious that I can optimize a lot better. Just to be clear, the offer goes for you as a group or each one individually. I would love to work together on something great. For now I bid you farewell.”

The armored men retreated with deliberation. The tank didn’t move from its spot. While the invaders fled the area, driving off in trucks parked at the edge of the compound, Ren wondered what protection the Shadow had against being followed. After all, they were inside a city.

For that matter why hadn’t the police shown up yet? There were businesses and apartments around. Did the Shadow have a way of keeping them away? Or was the organization in cahoots with law enforcement and made sure they remained camouflaged in their shiny office building.

“Wait!” Minhyun yelled. “How did you block my ability and Ren’s?”

To their surprise they got an answer. “Simple. Lobotomy. I scooped out as much brain from my agents here as possible. Now if you would kindly move away, this battle tank is rigged to explode when the random number generator spits out a seventeen. Just my way of making sure you won’t come after my men. Lobotomies are expensive if you want them done well. I have to protect my assets, you understand.”

The trio bailed. Ren fashioned Panic, a construct. It lifted Baekho by his collar and dragged him – fast – behind them as they raced for the door.

The operatives on the other side were already evacuating and the boys joined them, Panic and Baekho tailing behind.

It was an explosion capable of tearing the still standing walls of the negotiation room down. And a few more besides. Ren didn’t hear well for the rest of the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold. Archnemesis revealed!


	21. Healing Time - C

Junior was in a conference.

The four boys who weren’t Junior had a conference of their own. The common room had become their center of operations. In a sense they were saying goodbye to the building. With the compound so thoroughly compromised the organization had decided to move headquarters to one of their other bases.

It was quiet.

Ren had difficulties finding order in the ever drifting emotions in the room. Aron was mostly angry (at not being able to do anything), Baekho was kind of sad (at having been knocked out when his friends had needed him and becoming a burden), Minhyun was uncomfortable (because he hated confrontations) and Ren himself… well that was the most difficult one to figure out.

There was a piece of paper in front of Aron where they had planned to write down questions they had for Junior, but none of them had felt like preparing things to say. They didn’t want to read a script, they wanted to actually _talk_.

After what seemed like hours Ren finally gave a warning. No one else would approach the room at this time feeling like that.

“He’s coming. And he’s gloomy.”

Junior entered trying to make little noise. They had told him they wanted to talk, but it was clear that this was more of an interrogation. The leader looked appropriately anxious as he sat down on the only available chair.

Ren hadn’t even noticed that the others had moved closer together. Now it seemed as if they had prepared it so that Junior was singled out. The empath scooted his chair a tiny bit closer to the leader before things settled.

The newly arrived boy took a deep breath and began to speak without looking anyone in the eyes.

“So I’ve come back from the… um, board of directors. They had a lot to say about how I should have exploited the time loop but after that was off the table we talked about the Shadow. It’s unsettling to them and the whole organization is working overtime to find out more about him. When we have him, we can strike. Or you can join him if you want.”

“We would never,” Minhyun said firmly.

They had not discussed the option. They didn’t need to.

With a slight hint of a smile Junior continued. “It’s settled that we’re moving to a new location. And catching moles and double agents has become a priority. The board of directors wants nothing more than to expose them.”

Baekho raised his hands. “How do we know those directors of yours aren’t moles?”

Junior shook his head unconsciously. “The Shadow told us he made sure nobody who could trigger my abilities to tip me off about him was in contact with me. Which makes perfect sense. The agents working for him have to be at other locations of the organization. And I’ve been in contact with the directors a lot. I mean, today was a video conference, but I’ve met each of them a couple times.”

No one had any questions about that particular topic and so it got quiet again with everybody wrecking their brain for anything to say and avoiding everybody else’s gaze.

Ren flinched as Minhyun poked his mind. The boy sent “Shouldn’t we continue telepathically? Just in case there are bugs installed. Not to be paranoid, but I don’t like the idea of someone knowing exactly what our next moves are.”

He had a point. A little paranoia now could safe them a lot of trouble later.

“I’ve been stupid,” Junior sent into the group, tear welling up in his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I brought you here and let you think we’re some kind of superhero team and you’re joining to catch some bad guys. I should have been honest. I… I haven’t…”

Ren spoke – well, _thought_ – over him. “Junior? How long have you been here?”

“…pretty long.”

“And… have you always been… alone?”

The tears were answer enough. Ren got up and gave Junior a hug which turned into a group cuddle until the chair under the leader made dangerous noises and they let up.

Junior rubbed his temples. He dared to look at the boys standing around him. “I was so dumb about the time loop. But I thought it was the end of the world and once we realized what was happening I was already all about stopping it. I never considered to change my, I dunno, my mode of thought.”

“No one’s blaming you,” Minhyun sent.

“The board of directors is.”

Ren sat back down on his chair. “Who are those people anyway? And if the organization isn’t a superhero meetup, what is it?”

There was a long silence from Junior before he sent something again. “It’s a money making scheme.”

“What?” Aron leaned back in his chair, his head thrown back in frustration. “Seriously, if you want money I’ll transmute you some gold. Why is there a problem?”

“You see,” Junior sent, “When I discovered my powers, I did what everyone would have done with them: Gamble. I couldn’t lose in betting games and roulette and poker and… really anything. I was too young to play at the casino but I had friends who could pass for legal age. I helped them win a lot and got my share. Then we turned to other thing like horse racing. And a few years later, the stock market.”

Aron whistled. “That’s seriously messed up,” he said out loud.

“And then,“ Baekho sent, “You founded the organization?”

Junior shrugged. “A few very rich, very powerful people figured out that it was me who made my friends win all that money and things got ugly. But when they realized that I could help them get even richer, they offered to make things easy for me and leave my friends alone. But I couldn’t see them again and…”

“So,” Ren sent, trying to sound casual with his mental voice, even though he was freaking out inside. “What _is_ the purpose of the organization?”

“To cover my tracks. I predict outcomes for all kinds of stuff the directors get involved in. Mostly the stock market and other investments. In turn they run a multinational, hidden, semi-legal organization that exists only to keep me and my activities a secret.”

Ren had a realization. “Going by your tiny, old room I suppose you don’t see any of that money?”

“I… um, I wanted to do some good so the directors told me they were using the money for other stuff. Sending vaccines to poor countries and stopping drug traffic and-“

Aron leaned in. He spoke slowly with his mental voice. “Have you ever seen proof of that?”

“Y- but, I… I was so young.“

Junior buried his head in his hands as he realized what the others had already understood. The directors were greedy, barbaric monsters who had socially isolated and manipulated a little kid to gather untold riches. There was no good being done. The organization existed to keep the rich conspirators safe and comfortable. It was hard to say how much power the directors had amassed. The Shadow’s talk about ‘world domination’ sounded slightly less ridiculous now.

Minhyun established a link without Junior and within seconds they had agreed to do something about this crime.

Drastic changes were in order.

Aron lifted the pen and slid his empty paper into position. “Junior, we need names. All of them.”

 

***

 

After this one, the boys held yet another conference – without Junior. It was agreed that he was too involved and shouldn’t be burdened with the events that were to follow.

Aron, Minhyun and Baekho boarded one of the aircrafts the organization owned, plus an operative as pilot, and spent the next few days talking to the directors. And take a few things apart if necessary.

Ren volunteered to stay behind. He wasn’t comfortable splitting up again already but it seemed preposterous that the Shadow was going to engage just one day after the last fight. Especially if his offer had been serious. The offer, by the way, turned out to be a godsend. If the directors didn’t only have to fear the boys leaving, but joining a threatening opposition at boot, well that was all the scarier.

 

***

 

_[Mature content from now on for the rest of the chapter]_

It was past midnight and the two boys were in Junior’s old room drifting in and out of sleep.

The leader looked up at the faux sky, Ren had his eyes on the other boy. There had been no more interruptions. They had shared the night. On the small bed it would have been impossible not to lay skin on skin. The same blanket covered their naked bodies.

“How do you feel?”

Junior tore his eyes away from the plastic constellations. “About what?”

“…Just… you know.”

“My emotions? Can’t you sense them?”

“I’d still like you to say it.”

It was true that Ren could not have overlooked the burning love and adoration radiating from his bed partner. And all the other little thing, too. The small worries that kept surfacing.

Junior hummed non-committally. “Well, I’m a bit hungry.”

“Junior!”

“What?”

“This is supposed to be a romantic moment,” Ren said with a groan. This boy was unbelievable.

“Why? What’s romantic about being sticky?” Junior stuck out his tongue. “I should take a shower before falling asleep or I’ll wake up with dried come streaks everywhere. And I need to get the taste out of my mouth. That romantic to you?”

“You’re impossible. And it’s pointless anyway. If you take a look into the future I’m sure you’ll see us humping each other again in ten minutes.”

Junior sighed. “It’s more pain than pleasure at this point. Little Junior is going to fall off.”

“Then you better use it before that happens.” Ren patted Junior’s crotch through the fabric, making the boy giggle and curl up. The ensuing tickle fight was a tangled mess of limbs until Ren conjured new restraining Conmotes. Junior could have evaded since he certainly saw them coming, but chose not to.

What position should he pick this time? Ren asked himself. They were basically through the whole catalog of things that didn’t require penetration. Sixty nine again? Actually, his constructs could carry a lot of weight…

“Say Junior, have you considered hanging from the ceiling?”

“…No?”

“Sound fun?”

The boy got up to let his wrists be tied behind his back. He grinned brightly. “Let’s find out.”

 

 

_A/N: These healing time chapters weren’t supposed to be full of massive reveals but I think I just turned a lot of things upside down. Including Junior in the end._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These healing time chapters weren’t supposed to be full of massive reveals but I think I just turned a lot of things upside down. Including Junior in the end.


	22. Death without Sin (1)

There was an endless list of urgent things to do.

Naturally, the boys decided to take a vacation.

To be fair there was more waiting for them in Busan than the beach. The same signature radio signals as from the time loop device had been detected at the coast. Diving bots would try to locate the exact source. But until then, Nuest could pretend to have a lovely day in the sand by having a lovely day in the sand.

Another aspect was the lack of an intermediate headquarter, since the old one was getting dismantled and the new one wasn’t ready yet.

Baekho had spent a lot of the trip sleeping. He was able to impress he others with his ability to sleep even through their jamming sessions. The armored limousine with darkened windows driving them to Busan offered a multimedia experience that only a million dollar car could have.

It struck Baekho as strange how little he cared for all the material goods he had gotten access to. Back in his old life he was surrounded by people who had to work tirelessly just to get by and sometimes not even that.

His current situation wasn’t so much an addition of material goods to his life as it was a lack of the constantly nagging fear of bankruptcy. It made him hate the directors even more. How was it possible for anyone to feel greed after having more money than one could spend?

The boys of Nuest, and a few secret agents guarding them, checked into a hotel under false names and headed straight for the beach.

It was a bit windy but otherwise perfect. Baekho made sure everybody took a swim in the ocean. Ren refused, but what were Baekho’s muscles good for if not for carrying cute, little Ren to his wet doom? Despite the struggle Ren put up, Baekho successfully got the boy in the water. No one else refused after that. A pity. Baekho would have liked to throw some more boys around.

He got sidetracked when a swarm of fish passed him by. He swam down until he was out of sight of the surface and shifted.

One thing he had found out during training in the organization was that he could breathe underwater in Twi. Or rather that he didn’t have to breathe at all. Adding his power over Twi’s gravity to this, Baekho could navigate perfectly underwater. He only had to make sure to stay deep enough not to let any civilians back at the beach see him using his ability when he left Twi.

He popped out in the middle of the swarm, scattering the fish in all directions. He went up for air and searched for the swarm again. Scaring fish was a fun enough pastime.

Junior and Ren were trying to drown each other by the looks of it. Minhyun and Aron collected shells for the children whose parents wouldn’t let them go into the deeper parts. Even the men secretly watching over them had found things to do.

Baekho went back to swimming.

 

***

 

It was almost an hour later when his appetite grew larger than his desire to stay in the water. The mix of actual swimming in reality and underwater-flying in Twi had kept him from tiring out.

When he made his way back onto land he noticed that something was wrong right away. All the people were gone. The beach was deserted. Then his mind got a telepathic poke.

“Baekho?” Minhyun asked through a link.

“Yes? Where is everyone?”

“Are you back at the beach? I was just about to call out to you.”

“Yeah, I’m right here. But no one else is.”

Minhyun directed him to the now abandoned stalls where Baekho had hoped to find a food vendor. But everything was closed. Luckily he had packed a bag full of snacks. He knew his body’s needs.

The other four boys were staring at a screen held up by an operative.

“What’s going on?” Baekho asked with his mouth full of chips.

Junior looked up. “Earthquake in the next five minutes. Over ninety percent chance. Maybe followed by a tsunami, though much less probable.”

“Woah.”

Baekho dried himself off and slipped back into regular beach clothes before joining the boys again. They moved back to their car, the only one that hadn’t followed the evacuation order yet.

“What are we looking at?” he asked as he realized that everyone was still staring at the same screen.

Minhyun gestured. “There’s something at the bottom of the ocean. We’re looking at the feed from a diving probe. It’s possible the Shadow has built a structure there. When Junior predicted the earthquake we figured that it’s a good idea to take a closer look. Just in case the structure gets damage we could learn from.”

“That earthquake,” Junior said, “is about to hit us, by the way.”

“Sir,” an operative with a clunky remote control unit said. “We should move the bot closer. I think there’s an even larger part of the structure ahead. If you look close, there seems to be something metallic.”

“Right,” Junior said, “move in.”

The view changed as the bot swam past the concrete poking from the ocean floor. The metal turned out to be some kind of sensor that blinked as the probe came closer. Dust shot up into the water as explosives went off.

The wave of the subaquatic explosions reached the bot and the feed cut out. Seconds later the earth began to tremble.

“We caused this,” Junior said, eyes wide. “We activated a self-destruct mechanism.”

“Man,” Ren said, “the Shadow sure hates it if we find his toys. At least he won’t get back whatever was down there, right? And the quake was fairly minor.”

Junior’s face paled. “Oh no. No. This is bad. The future changed.”

“What are you seeing?” Aron asked.

“Busan is doomed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beach episode: check.


	23. Death without Sin (2)

There wouldn’t be enough time to evacuate the entire city, so they didn’t. The only thing they could do was call in help from headquarters and the Korean military. Although it might be difficult to explain the threat and still be taken seriously.

Junior looked out over the water. “It’s going to come out right there at the suspension bridge and run straight through it. It’ll be about… twenty or so stories tall. Baekho, get Aron into position on top of the skyscraper on the other riverside.”

Baekho let Aron hop onto his back and shifted them both. Twi was the usual overcast, gray, quiet spitting image of the real world. They were cut off from Minhyun’s link and Aron’s powers didn’t work. But there was no better way to get around if you had to put the heavy hitter of the team on rooftops.

The white tiger lifted off the ground and Aron clutched him even more tightly. Baekho knew the boy had an aversion against falling from great heights. Well, so did everybody, but Aron’s fear was based on prior experience.

Flying still took its time, barely faster than running, but it didn’t tire him out.

“Aron?”

“Yeah?”

“You think you can handle a…Kaiju?”

“Sure. What would stop me? As long as it doesn’t have one of those force fields that block my powers.”

Baekho chuckled. “Now that you’ve said it, it’s bound to have one. Don’t tempt fate.”

“I better knock on wood,” Aron said and knocked Baekho’s head.

“ _Ouch_! Hey! Why did you do that?”

“Is that… don’t Korean’s do that?”

“Do what?”

“Never mind.”

Baekho dropped Aron off on the skyscraper from where he would have a perfect view of the Kaiju’s projected path. They popped. The water next to the bridge was already turbulent. Something big moved underneath, faintly visible under the surface.

He heard it before he saw it. The moment the short snout broke through the water the air vibrated with a deafening screeching overlaid by whale-like sing song. The head poked out of the water – reptilian and warty. Tiny, pure black eyes glared at the bridge ahead as water ran down the monster’s face.

The torso followed. A hideous mess of scaly, rough lumps strewn asymmetrically across the bloated belly. Six limbs with different numbers of joints rose above the surface.

“Here we go,” Aron said in English.

Nothing happened.

“Aron?” Junior asked through the link.

“I couldn’t tear it apart! I don’t know what happened. It definitely does _not_ have a force field. It must be made from _impossibly_ hard material – harder than diamond. Let me try something else then.”

The boy moved his hands and it was as if the Kaiju had been hit by an invisible fist that matched the monster’s size. The creature’s head was thrown back, its body bending over. It fell backward, splashing into the water.

A tail twice as long as the torso burst through the surface and smashed into the bridge from below, cutting it in half. The steel tore and contorted, cars and fleeing people falling into the river.

“Junior,” Aron sent, “Why didn’t you say anything.”

“I didn’t see any way to save the bridge anymore. It was better to get the first punch in. There’s a five percent chance it’ll just run off, so I suspect we only need to beat it up. _There_! It’s coming out by the hotel right there.”

Baekho didn’t see it. He wondered briefly if Junior’s prediction had been wrong.

The Kaiju jumped from the river bed right into the hotel, leaping a hundred meters in the air. It was much more mobile than its size had made him believe. It was hard to estimate how many people had been in that building. Baekho was frozen in shock.

Aron huffed. “Can I assume collateral damage isn’t a concern anymore?”

“Just do what you can,” Junior sent. “Kill it at all costs. Secrecy be damned.”

As the Kaiju screeched again, stomping through the rubble of the still collapsing building, Aron aimed his hand. An orb, brighter than the sun, was called into existence.

The American boy shot the plasma projectile towards the monster and the impact on its head produced a heatwave that melted all glass and plastic in the surrounding architecture. The air flickered from the unnatural increase in temperature.

The ultra-hard reptile was unaffected. Barely any scales had been burned. It dashed further into the city, clawing away at a few taller buildings as it stomped along a major road, cars getting wrecked under its four feet. The boys lost sight of it as it entered another district, slipping between high buildings.

“Baekho, bring me closer.”

The white tiger grabbed his companion from behind and shifted them both, carrying Aron bridal style. He wasn’t as fast as the creature, but he could get Aron to an even higher building. The American could extend his power across the whole city as long as he saw where he was aiming.

Popping out on top of the tallest skyscraper he could reach in time, Baekho looked for the creature. It had made its way further into the city, killing everyone who wasn’t fast enough.

“Oh good, you’re back,” Junior sent. “Listen, its behavior is so erratic I can’t give you anything with more than fifty percent accuracy. Basically, I think it’s a frightened animal and any little thing can make it change course.”

Aron raised his hands, hesitated and lowered them again. “I can’t hit it again. I’d only punch it into a building. It’s surrounded.”

“Throw something,” Ren suggested over the link.

“Throw what? The only thing big enough to hurt it are buildings. I’ll try to…come at it from above?”

Aron slammed as much kinetic energy as he could muster into the beast from the top down. It broke through the ground and vanished entirely in an earthquake much bigger than the one that had started it all. Multiple buildings collapsed and cracks in the road widened to swallow entire columns of fleeing cars.

The Kaiju jumped out of the hole and dashed away in a panic, making its way towards the end of the street – towards a school.

“What do I do?” Aron asked, but nobody had an idea. His voice was wavering. He had reached the limit of what his power could accomplish.

“…just… I dunno,” Junior sent. “Punch it into a less densely settled area.”

The creature was closing in on the school.

“Throw me,” Baekho said to the American.

“What?”

“ _Throw me_!”

He wasn’t sure if Aron had understood his intent or simply believed in the white tiger’s ability to handle the situation, but Baekho found himself losing the ground under his feet and accelerating towards the Kaiju.

Aron had guided his flight well and he slammed into the cold, rough skin of the creature with just enough momentum to hold onto the lumpy spikes. He was half climbing a mountain, half riding a dragon.

As soon as he had a firm grip, Baekho shifted.

It was by far the biggest thing he had ever brought into Twi with him. There was no way of knowing in advance if it would work at all, but he had to try to save the children.

The monster didn’t slow down its assault on the city, breaking through the empty replica of the school and out the other side as if stepping through paper.

If he could hold on, he would be able to keep it in Twi until it had tired itself out or run into an unpopulated area. But that was difficult with the creature’s frantic movements throwing him left and right. If he lost his grip he’d make it pop wherever it was. He could only hope Junior was able to give Aron a warning if they had to cut it close.

He had only been riding the Kaiju for a minute or so but he was already feeling the strain on his body. He was fairly sure one or two of his fingers were broken judging by the pain. And the permanent tension he had to keep up was making his legs spasm.

A plan. He needed a plan. First, he’d let the Kaiju out. He didn’t have much of a choice there. And from his spot on the beast’s back, surrounded by fleshy spikes, it wasn’t possible for him to say what kind of area they were roaming through.

Second, he had to hope Aron and Junior were able to take care of the situation until Baekho had been able to explain the idea coalescing in his mind.

He let go. The Kaiju popped out. He rushed to the ground and returned to reality, right into a huge cloud of smoke caused by the creature stumbling into an apartment building and bringing it down around itself. Baekho shifted and flew out of range of the blast before returning to reality again. Minhyun found him immediately.

“Aron!” the white tiger sent.

“Baekho, you’re back?”

“Didn’t Junior warn you?”

“The other three are in a car driving after it. Junior can’t see right now.”

Minhyun sent “We’ll be right there. Can you get Aron? We’re trying to follow it so Junior can predict its moves.”

Baekho ran away from the fallen building while the Kaiju changed its course at random behind it. He had to ask Aron a few questions about his ability before going back into Twi and getting the American off the skyscraper.


	24. Death without Sin (3)

Baekho popped out behind Aron, startling the boy a bit even though he had been expected. Without a further word they began their flight through Twi.

Every minute or so, Baekho put them down on a roof or convenient balcony to reestablish contact with the others and – if necessary – have Aron slap the Kaiju to a side where it would do less damage.

By now the monster had traversed a whole district and left a zig-zag trail of demolished architecture behind it.

There was one power in Aron’s repertoire they had yet to try.

The boys ran along the streets, cutting off the monster’s path. Its massive shadow darkened the sky above them as they approached it from the side. The huffing breathing noises it made were oddly un-animalistic, more like wind moving through a tunnel. The ground shook every time it set one of its six appendages down, splitting the asphalt underneath it.

The tail slashed left and right, inflicting scars upon the buildings lining the path of the beast and occasionally unearthing a lamp post or a tree.

Once they were almost under the belly of the Kaiju, Aron told Baekho to shift for his own safety, but Baekho refused.

“I’m not leaving you. If we need to get away we can’t afford to miss a second.”

“Fine, but don’t touch anything metal.”

Aron stretched his arms and arcs of electricity jumped from his body into the air. The sizzling of ionized air made Baekho duck instinctively.

The lightning outshone the sun.

Kinetic and thermal energy hadn’t done the trick, but every lifeform was based on bio-electricity to some extent.

Forking fingers of blue and white light licked across the massive body looming above the boys. Aron kept up the assault for a few seconds until he ran out of juice.

Baekho knew he had run out of juice because the boy announced it over the link along with a simple statement that he hadn’t even known this could happen.

Regardless, the Kaiju had stopped walking. Or breathing. Slowly its body tilted sideways.

“It’s falling,” Baekho said.

“I can see that,” Aron said. He flicked his wrist and the reptile was punched in the flank, making it slide ten meters, so that it fell onto the road rather than into a three story boutique.

The impact made the ground shake one last time before relative silence set in. Far away sirens were blasting their warning noises. A sound like a growling stomach came from the fallen creature. Its head moved.

“Is it-“

The Kaiju stood back up. With great trouble at first and shaky legs. But as soon as it was fully risen it leapt across two streets into a different block of houses. The boys could clearly hear the devastation the Kaiju caused but had lost sight of it.

Aron gave the others a report. Junior was currently boarding a helicopter but there wasn’t much he could help with. Knowing which path the monster would walk gave them no way of stopping it. But this had only been plan A.

 

***

 

They caught up to the beast just when it reached a park area, which was the perfect spot for Baekho’s plan B. The opportunity was too good to wait around.

“Aron, are you ready? It’s now or never.”

“Sure, drop me off there and do your thing.”

Minhyun sent them a ‘good luck’ and the boys went back into Twi. Baekho flew them past the spot where the Kaiju was slowly stomping in reality and brought them both to the very edge of the park.

When they popped, the white tiger saw the helicopters approaching. They were either military or owned by the organization, he didn’t know, but Junior told him that he was in contact with the pilots and had informed them about the plan.

It was time.

Baekho nodded at Aron and got thrown onto the Kaiju again. The second time around the experience wasn’t any easier. The skin would have been simple enough to hold onto but the constant shaking that reverberated through the creature with each of its steps made it much harder.

Minhyun kept him up to date. Ren had arrived in a truck and was now attacking with an army of Conmotes, the fear and confusion of an entire city at his disposal. Looking behind him, Baekho saw a true flood of gray and black figures with uncanny proportions throwing themselves at the beast’s feet to force it into the park.

The white tiger shivered. He kept forgetting how dangerous Ren really was.

After a while of erratic tramping that almost threw Baekho off the back of the Kaiju several times, Junior shouted into the link. “Aron, now!”

The park turned to fine sand. The American boy had transmuted the earth a hundred meters down into flimsy powder. Every tree, every bench and every trashcan sank under its own weight.

And so did the monster with the white tiger clinging to its back.

“Baekho,” Junior sent, “Now’s the time.”

“Alright. See you in ten seconds.”

Baekho shifted the Kaiju into Twi and they kept sinking through the powder exactly as before. But back in reality, Baekho knew, Aron was executing the final step of the plan.

The monster struggled, but even as its sinking slowed, it still went further and further into the ground. Baekho counted to ten, forcing himself to do it slowly so make sure Aron had enough time.

When the sand was up to the Kaiju’s head, he let go and flew up.

Taking deep breaths – even though in Twi he didn’t have to breathe – Baekho flew back to Aron’s position and popped out.

The park was a crater. Dust was still settling. But the Kaiju was silent. Its head poked out of the earth. Yes, Aron had turned the sand back, but with the Kaiju in Twi there was nothing that kept the powder from filling the hole the monster had left. And so, when the Kaiju popped back, it did so  _inside_  a whole lot of earth, merging its body with the dead matter.

Usually, Baekho’s power kept things from popping inside other things in reality. Something, usually, gave in. But with Aron keeping the dirt and stone compressed through his power, the creature stood no chance.

This time it was properly dead – large portions of its grotesque body literally turned to stone. Junior announced there didn’t seem to be any significant probability of it rising again.

It was over.


	25. Death without Sin (4)

It wasn’t over.

Although the damage was overwhelmingly done to infrastructure like roads, powerlines and storefronts, there were several collapsed apartments. Fires had broken out. Cracks caused by the numerous earthquakes made it hard for emergency services to reach the devastated areas.

Junior’s helicopter landed next to the park. “Hop in,” he sent. “We’ll be staying at a residence in Japan. The organization is working at a cover up for us but the Kaiju is impossible to miss, so we have to get out before cameras show up.”

Aron walked through the small storm the rotor blades created and began to board, but Baekho didn’t move.

“But we… we have to help. There are people buried under the debris for sure.”

Through the aircraft's window he saw Junior shake his head. “If we become public knowledge we’ll have to operate within the bureaucracy of transnational relations. It’s the main thing that kept me from revealing myself throughout the years. And now more than ever we _need_ to be independent. Can you imagine how long it would take us to respond to a threat like that,” –he gestured at the motionless head of the buried monster– “if we had to wait for governmental approval. And that’s not even considering a _deliberate_ attack by the Shadow.”

The two missing boys arrived at the scene by car. Ren talked to Minhyun over the aircrafts’ noise as they walked closer. Strange, Baekho though, how speaking was more private than thinking around here.

“Ren,” he sent, startling the boy, “You could produce so many helpers. Won’t you do a thing?”

After a few seconds the boy answered over the link, staying out of earshot. “Junior’s right. We can’t go public in the middle of our own crisis. We’re rearranging the entire organization right now. With everything hanging in the balance we can’t afford-“

“ _Can’t afford_?! We’re letting people die now, because it’s inconvenient?”

He got no answer. Everyone acted rather crestfallen but he got neither support nor objections. There was a cold terror rising in him. The very boys who had taught him to care about more than his immediate surroundings were refusing to do anything to help when those how needed help were right there.

The smoke rising above the district was going to reach them soon. They’d have to leave at least the immediate area in a minute or it would become too dangerous for the helicopter to lift off.

“Fine,” he yelled out loud and sent as angrily as possible at the same time. “You hide somewhere cozy. I’ll help. I can fly rescuers in or victims out. Whatever they need. You’re not going to stop me, are you?”

Minhyun took a few steps towards him. “At least let me fix that first.”

Baekho looked down at his horrifically swollen fingers. Oh right, he had broken those. The pain had kind of blended in with all the other things he felt.

He reached out and accepted Minhyun’s offer. Blinding light emanated from the tall boy’s hands, enveloping the white tiger’s wounded spots, healing his bones in the fingers and the bruises he had incurred everywhere else.

“Even you?” Baekho asked, speaking aloud this time to keep the others from hearing. “I thought you’d help, more than anyone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, really? Because you can do pretty much anything short of raising the dead and there are a lot of wounds to fix around here. You’ll help _me_ but not _them_. I admit, I’ve been selfish for most of my life. I thought I had to. But when I met you – all of the others, but mostly you – I began to understand that I shouldn’t only care about those closest to me. I thought…”

Minhyun looked him firmly in the eyes. “I’m afraid you’re still very much like that.”

Baekho would rather have taken a fist to the face than a comment like that. He trusted Minhyun unconditionally. He had thought of the lanky boy as the most morally upstanding person he’d ever met. But most of all, he trusted his judgement above all others.

“W-what do you m- …I’m-“ Taking a step back, Baekho stared at the healer.

There was a lot of sadness in Minhyun’s expression, but his voice was steady. “You only want to help people around you. This disaster is fresh and immediate and quite simply, close to you. I don’t want to come up with some analogy about starving kids in Africa, but basically the only reason you’re so adamant we shed all secrecy – consequences be damned – is that you already feel involved here.”

Could that be right?

“Well,” Minhyun continued, getting louder, “guess what, you’re not involved. The _Shadow_ is our business and we took care of his Kaiju project and that’s all we _should_ do. The thing you _are_ involved with is _us_. There is so much more we have yet to do, so many battles to fight. And we need to plan strategically. There are more lives down the line we _will_ save. Depending on what the Shadow can throw at us, perhaps millions of lives.”

Minhyun poked Baekho in the chest. “But those people are not here right now, so you don’t consider them. You’re still selfish! Because you want to waste resources on feeling good about yourself. Because you want instant Boy Scout points. Because you can’t even conceptualize what you’d be giving up.”

“I- You- …but,“ Baekho wanted it to stop, wanted the accusations to stop, more even than he wanted to defend himself. They were all against him. And he had no idea what to say. He trusted them and their judgement cut deep. So he _had_ to be wrong.

With no further argument Baekho boarded the helicopter.

 

***

 

The flight was spent in silence but he knew for sure that the others were linking and discussing what had happened, perhaps building further strategies.

He spent his time thinking by himself. About his priorities, his loyalties, his gut feelings. About what he valued and who he wanted to keep in his life. There was no way he was giving up on Nuest. He had been there when Aron had threatened the directors into submission and it had felt so good to know that they were doing good deeds going forward. He didn’t want to stop feeling that way. He didn’t want to disappoint and more than anything he didn’t want to be an outsider to the group.

Halfway to Japan he couldn’t hold it in any longer. Baekho cried. And it was Minhyun – of all people – who held him in his arms, despite how uncomfortable that must been for the tall boy in the crowded aircraft.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please tell me I did well on this, because I had a lot of trouble with the fight scenes during this arc in particular. Sadface. Be honest, though. The more detailed your critique the more you’re helping me.  
> Can’t have an East Asian superhero fic without a Kaiju, though. Also I’ve never been in a helicopter that was actually in the air. I just know there’s a lot less space than you’d think from looking at the outside.  
> Next up is a healing time chapter. God(zilla) knows we need it.


	26. Healing Time - D

Even boxing a sandbag didn’t do the trick.

Baekho was still full of energy and he didn’t know where to put it. Was he even angry? And if so, at what? The Japanese facility at which they were staying had a less well equipped training chamber than the headquarters. No surprise there, but he if he couldn’t get exhausted by working out what else was there to do?

With heavy breath and drenched in sweat he made his way to the showers.

It turned out taking a half hour shower didn’t help either.

 

***

 

 _[Mature content for the rest of the chapter._ Really _graphic. Proceed at your own risk.]_

Even though the compound was small, it had a confusing layout. Which room was his? Whatever, he’d have to try doors to find it. Maybe a round of sleep would somehow keep him from feeling like a whistling teakettle.

He opened the first door and found himself looking upon Ren’s uncovered behind. The boy was standing at the edge of the bed and was – quite evidently – f***ing whoever was on their back on the mattress.

Ren turned his head around, not particularly alarmed. And not slowing down.

Baekho was about to leave when he heard the moans of the person on the bed increase. It was unmistakably Nuest’s leader. Well, a few things made sense now.

“Harder!” Junior demanded.

Baekho had never seen himself as the kind of guy who f***ed other guys. Ren was pretty and maybe he wouldn’t have said no to that, but he tended not to think about it. Junior’s voice, though, caused a stir in his pants.

The leader’s voice was always a bit sensual – so high that it could have been effeminate, but with a raspy, coarse quality that gave it masculine dominance. Hearing that same voice crack with less and less coherent groans approaching climax... that made the white tiger’s blood shoot south.

Ren smiled a twisted smile at him and turned back to his lover. Ren stopped f***ing, broadened his stance on the floor and resumed with a vigor and pace that was almost brutal. For a moment Baekho was worried Junior’s insides would be shaken into disarray, with his heart ending up in his stomach and vice versa.

The sound of flesh on flesh slamming together in a fierce rhythm finally turned Baekho’s semi hard-on into a full erection, impossible to hide in his baggy sweatpants.

That was it. That was how he could blow some steam. He had to get off.

Hesitating only a split second, Baekho shoved his hand into his pants and began rubbing the skin of his tool until it went from hard to _hard_ – the pressure from within making it almost ache.

At least, he figured, he should close the door. He took a step into the room and shut the door quietly behind him, not letting go of his member. With his other hand freed up, he cupped his balls.

Junior’s moans were whiny screams now, wavering as his body was rocked. Baekho saw that there were nebulous pink Conmotes tying the leader up, holding his knees bent and his legs high above his head.

Ren and Junior were holding hands over the group leader’s abs. Not in the cute way – Ren’s thrusts would have pushed Junior away from the edge otherwise. Their slender arms were flexed, making their vein and tendons pop.

They were both _loud_ when they came. Junior’s d*ck twitched as if it had a mind of its own and sprayed four loads that distributed his come across his chest in thick spurts. The boy arched his back up and gripped the mattress, breathless and flexing every muscle in his lithe body.

It was evident that Ren came simultaneously, kicked over the brink by Junior’s sphincter clenching from orgasm.

The thin, pink constructs vanished and Ren collapsed onto the boy he had so thoroughly devastated. They shared a sloppy kiss until Junior shoved his partner to the side and sat up with a shocked expression.

It was apparent that Junior hadn’t known about having an audience.

“Um… hi?” Baekho said, his hands both in his pants, his tool poking the fabric where a wet spot had formed at the tip of the tent.

As Junior only looked back and forth between him and Ren, who as visibly unconcerned with the situation, quietly chuckling to himself, Baekho felt the need to explain his presence.

“I… I was looking for my room.”

“Well,” Junior said, his voice still rough from screaming earlier. “This isn’t it.”

“Yeah. But… Ren didn’t seem to mind me watching and I thought you’d- Wait! Shouldn’t you have known I would come in before I even opened the door?”

“I was kind of distracted you know. Orgasming and such.”

“Right. I… guess I’ll be going then.”

He turned around and was immediately assaulted by a golden rope-like arm, slinging itself around his neck. A new Conmote. The pretty empath had dropped into a chair and sprawled with his legs spread.

“Not so fast, tiger boy. You’ve seen the goods, it’s only fair to reciprocate.”

If there was even a small chance Ren was suggesting what Baekho hoped he was suggesting… well, there was no way the horny boy would miss out on that opportunity.

He took one very important step. It was a literal step through space, but also a jump into Twi and immediately back out. This not only freed him from the strangling arm – whichever emotion it was made from – but also his clothes.

He could bring things into Twi that he was touching. But he didn’t have to. A small pile of clothing dropped to the ground behind the fully nude Baekho as he reappeared.

In the chair, Ren looked impressed. On the bed, Junior looked confused.

Baekho flexed his muscles. If he was going to show off his body he was going to do it properly. He didn’t spend hours a day tiring himself out in the weight room without results.

“Nice,” Ren said, “but let’s see that in action. Junior, what position did we want to try next?”

“What? Wait,” the come covered boy said, “I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

“I’m pimping you out.”

“ _What_?”

Ren pointed at himself. “Empath here. Not sure why you’re denying it, but you’re about as turned on as it gets. I was thinking we should record our s*x, but watching it live would be even better. Baekho needs to get off. And I want a front row seat.”

At that point Baekho decided that if Junior could take a look into the future to see what was going to happen, then he might as well _make_ it happen without further delay.

The tiger rushed forward and pounced onto the bed, tackling his victim. Junior knew what was coming so he didn’t flinch. The slender boy leaned up to kiss Baekho’s lips and then wordlessly turned around so he was on all fours.

That was the position Baekho preferred, and he realized that the boy had likely known what he was going to say before he had to say it. How useful. The perfect f***-toy, really. For a second he was jealous of Ren, but then – who said this was the _only_ time he was going to bang the leader silly.

Junior arched his back down beautifully, letting his perky butt line up with Baekho’s hard-on. The boy was still lose and slick from the previous f*** and the remaining lube together with Ren’s cum was probably enough for Baekho to slide in.

Or not. This was out of Baekho’s realm of expertise. But if Junior saw pain in his future he’d surely stop. Unbelievably useful, that ability.

Baekho slipped his d*ck head in – past a small amount of resistance. The soft, hot, wet insides of Junior’s guts welcomed him and the thin boy moaned with his lips closed. The tiger laid his hands on Junior’s shoulders and humped his way in, inching a bit further with every slow thrust.

He had really needed this. And he was already getting close. Which was way too early.

Baekho breathed through the approaching orgasm, aspirating the tension away while going as slowly as he could bare. Junior was getting impatient and moved back, impaling himself down to the base.

Ren produced a tiny, pink creature that held Junior’s wrists behind his back. Now the boy couldn’t support his weight and depended on Baekho to hold him up. Which Baekho took as a signal to do as he pleased. The pace of f***ing increased a bit at first and – remembering that Junior had forewarning about pain – skipped over all concerns and negotiations.

Baekho did his best to outdo Ren’s previous show of fierceness. There was no dirty talk – the only sounds were grunts, hip slamming into hip and the creaking of the bed.

He let go of Junior’s shoulders and hugged him from behind, his fingers pinching the boy’s nipples mercilessly. He accomplished his goal of making the lithe boy’s moans even louder.

It was a beautiful sensation to hug Junior. The boy was so thin he seemed to vanish in the muscular, bulging arms that held him. His small body felt like the core of a person, like a boy stripped down to the center of his being. Perhaps I was a bit silly, but Baekho felt like he was f***ing Junior’s soul just as much as his butt.

Then he got an idea.

He would have apologized to Ren, but there would – presumably – be other times for the empath to watch.

Baekho shifted with Junior. The room didn’t change, except for the absence of Ren and the slight dimming of the light. And – a second later – the absence of gravity.

The duo lifted off the bed and rotated slowly in weightlessness. With Ren’s ties left back in reality, Junior was free to hold onto the aggressively f***ing Baekho. That went on for about a minute until no amount of deep breaths could delay the inevitable.

Driving into the boy as hard as he could, the white tiger popped them back and startled Ren as they fell from halfway between ceiling and bed. Just as they hit the mattress, Baekho filled Junior’s inside with hot juice, muffling his own scream by biting the spot between neck and shoulder on Junior’s thin body.

That was exactly what he had needed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have sinned all over the place and I’m terribly sorry. I never thought I’d write smut, but those boys are just so… ugh. What do you think? Please validate my appalling debauchery.


	27. Nightmare Journal (1)

Sitting around passively and hoping to find yet another one of those strange radio signals from the Shadow’s hidden endeavors was not only frustrating, it was _indefensible_.

They had superpowers, for crying out loud. There had to be something they could do.

Ren sat on the bed, lounging between the legs of Junior who lazily ran his fingers through Ren’s hair. If felt wonderfully calming – both the hairplay and the affection oozing out of the leader and Ren wouldn’t have traded his spot for anything in the world. Still, he felt restless.

It went without saying that their strategy wasn’t working. The underwater facility they had found had been rigged to explode with catastrophic results, so they needed a more careful approach that evaded detection. However, if the Shadow had time travel and Kaiju in his repertoire, they couldn’t afford to do anything short of seek and nuke any potential threat upon sight – the antithesis of caution.

If only there were a way for Ren to help.

He had seen the upper limits of his powers back in Busan and what he was capable of scared even him. With the despair and anger of multiple densely settled blocks around he had been able to breathe life into more Conmotes than he had been able to _count_. He had – how to describe it? – felt a _bloodlust_ of sorts, the moment he had realized the potential. Negative emotions could be made permanent through self-sustenance i.e. hurting people.

But his range was limited. He couldn’t influence a whole city. How could his silent worker drones aid them?

“Junior?”

“Huh?”

“How far does Minhyun’s reach go?”

“The dreamwalking?”

“Yeah.”

Junior preferred to ask for clarification rather than pull the reverence out of the future. Else he might have gotten into the habit of projecting entire conversations and it might have become difficult to distinguish what had been real and he could thus expect others to remember. Junior had strange worries nobody else could understand and Ren did his best to make it otherwise.

It took the weary lover a moment to collect his thoughts but Ren of course sensed the contemplation going on and stayed quiet.

“From what he told me,” Junior began, “and from what my random knowledge sense told me, I think his ability doesn’t do ‘range’ in the physical world. He builds, a plane that links – or weaves – the dreams of individuals into a connected coherent realm he can traverse. I mean, his _projected self_ traverses it.”

“Do you think,” Ren said, “we could combine our abilities to create something bigger? Or grander? Maybe I could use his telepathic range to construct and command Conmotes further away. Or he could use my emotion sense to target certain sleepers better.”

Junior sighed. “I have no idea. Baekho’s Twi seems not to allow any other ability to work when he takes one of us with him, so I- wait, yup. My random information sense tells me it works.”

“What?” Ren turned his head to meet the boy’s eyes. “Just like that?”

“It’s not too specific but yes. I’m glad it’s useful for once. Lately that power has only been telling me things I really don’t care about. Two yoghurts in the cafeteria have gone bad before their expiration date. The guy patrolling our corridor had to dye his hair from green back to black to get this job. There is a ten percent chance the main pipe in the upstairs bathroom will burst in a year or so. The site manager just bought a puppy…”

Ren let him ramble. It helped Junior to have someone who would indulge him when he expelled all the nuances and nuisances that flooded his mind half the time.

Back when he was close to the Kaiju, Junior had seen the creature’s past. He didn’t have much to report – the thing was grown in a tube and never saw the outside of its underwater prison. But one thing had been clear. There had been a machinery looking like the one in the bunker near Tokyo.

Assuming the Shadow had more of those, Ren had something specific to look for. If Minhyun and he could extent each other’s range indefinitely, that is.

 

***

 

“Have you thought about what to try first?” Minhyun asked.

The two of them were seated across each other in the dojo – a wooden room with bamboo mats over the floor and a few Kanji drawings hanging on the pillars that held the high ceiling. But otherwise empty.

Ren had finished his pondering. “I suppose ‘awake’ first. Seem to me that going to sleep is the more difficult part.”

Minhyun nodded and linked them.

The dojo was close to the provisional headquarters where the others were currently deciding whether to remain in Japan or not. But more importantly it was surrounded by trees, with only a few huts in direct reach of Ren’s power. The city proper wasn’t far away, so if they managed to expand their reach it would be simple to test.

Ren tranced as well he could. Minhyun would attempt to weave their waking minds into a dreamscape. If it worked it should be fundamentally different from the telepathy Ren was used to experiencing.

Over the course of two hours Ren did whatever he thought might help. He focused his emotion sense on Minhyun; he deliberately defocused his attention; he picked random people in the huts around and tried to perceive them in hopes of giving Minhyun something to tie into; he sat still; he ran in circles.

Around the time they became hungry, it was concluded – unspoken, but strongly implied by mutually assured sighing – to give up on plan A.

Lunch was a welcome distraction.

 

***

 

The next plan was for Ren to go to sleep first, with Minhyun staying awake. If that didn’t work then the other would also take the pill and they’d try their luck until Ren had finished the painting of a dog with both his parents watching over his shoulder inside the sanctuary, though which breed to chose? There were so many running around on the beach outside. It would be much easier if they stayed still since the ice-covered wasteland didn’t allow anything to move but the shimmering sea of fractured glass over which Ren was flying at high speed. It wouldn’t be long until he had gone over the horizon and into the galactic void of secundarity which he had to prevent if he wanted to follow the smell of roses.

Minhyun said “Hello.”

There was a stark discontinuity in Ren’s thoughts. What was this boy doing here? Wasn’t he supposed to be at the dojo to train? With… with himself?

“Since the medication will keep you asleep,” Minhyun continued, ”I guess I can just make this dream lucid without any danger of you waking up. _You’re dreaming_ , _Ren_.”

It made immediate sense and Ren was hit by the oddity of how he had ever not known he was currently dreaming, versus the lingering sensation of how real it had all felt seconds ago.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m lucid.”

Minhyun looked upon the place they were flying over. Ren wasn’t sure if it would be considered good dream etiquette to turn an ice-desert into something more hospitable. It wasn’t as if they felt temperature unless focused on it in particular.

“So,“ Minhyun said, kicking Ren out of his musings, “let’s get you acquainted with the dreamscape. And let’s see if your perception still functions properly.”


	28. Nightmare Journal (2)

In Minhyun’s presence it was possible to leave one’s own dream and enter the connecting scape. A disturbing experience for Ren who had not expected to feel completely lost once he stepped out of his dream.

A void – white but not blindingly so, diffuse and fog-like with no definitive direction or volume.

The strangest thing was perhaps to see his dream from the outside. A fractal-like scaffolding of sorts, fading into the void, held his dream’s fragments in place. The frozen landscape with the sanctuary still inside and the starry sky overhead – spotty and unfocused where Ren’s attention hadn’t been during his time inside – shrunk to the size of a diorama as Minhyun took him along.

“It’s the middle of the day,” Minhyun explained, “So there isn’t much going on. You should see it in a city at night. It’s an adventure without comparison.”

Aware he was still clad in a strange tunic, Ren tested his lucid dreamer abilities and created himself a new outfit just by looking down on himself the second after he thought of the items. Dim black clothing, comfortable but appropriately tight fitting for a journey.

 

***

 

The first dream was a living room. Bleak, earth tones, a bit dusty.

About three fourth of the room existed, the rest was so defocused that the white void seemed to be taking it back. All in all it looked like something between a theater backdrop and an unfinished level in one of Junior’s games.

A boy was crying in an alcove, barely visible behind a curtain. His sobbing was the only sound. Japanese was even harder to understand if the speaker was weeping. “They took her”, he mumbled, “mom is gone.” Those words were repeated often enough to make out.

“Can we help him?” Ren asked. “Not in the dream I mean. In real life. We should find out if his mom was really kidnapped.”

Minhyun shook his head. “Look at the furniture. This style is from decades ago. We’re seeing the childhood dream of an old, old man. Probably from the war.”

Now that it had been pointed out, the age of the scenery was obvious. Ren trusted the other boy’s expert judgement and they flew away. This was a research mission after all.

The next dream was a house of strange geometry, definitely not Japanese, Korean or Western style. The woman, whose dream it presumably was, tended to something that could have been a bookshelf or a potted plant at the same time. There were a few other strangely textured pieces of furniture whose purpose wasn’t apparent – was that teakettle dancing? –, but the thing Ren noticed the most was the total absence of _sound_.

For a moment it had been difficult to pinpoint. The void itself didn’t make any noises, but when he realized that he couldn’t even hear his own voice anymore it became clear.

“I think” Minhyun said – through a link –, “she’s deaf in real life. Let’s look at this from above.”

They flew out of the dream and looked down on it, strengthening the half-finished-backdrop-analogy Ren used to stay oriented. He wondered if Minhyun was linking with him in the real world and talking from the outside or if he was capable of nested links. He further wondered which of those possibilities would have been more amazing.

“Try sensing her,” Minhyun said with an inviting gesture.

Ren did what he always did to sense others. Simply letting the ambient information drizzle his way. This time that didn’t work as planned. But _something_ was there.

“It’s vague,” Ren said, “I’m getting something but it’s not from her. I don’t know. Is it possible the emotions are somewhere else around here? A core of the dream perhaps? Or a tether to the sleeping person?”

“Now that I think about it,” Minhyun said, “the woman you see down there, pruning her bonsai bookshelves, is merely an avatar. She not the person dreaming and possibly not even an image of her. Actually, with the reds and greens being so washed out to almost brown I’d guess the dreamer is likely male. Perhaps this character is a famil-“

“Your point is?”

“Right,” Minhyun said, shaking his head. “It’s not the people in the dream. It’s the whole dream itself that feels the emotions. Any character is at best a representation of an aspect or a fleeting role assumed by the dreamer.”

That sounded about as sensible as any other explanation. Ren tried again, this time deliberately sensing the environment as if it was a single entity. The drizzle focused in the same degree as his awareness expanded across the shifting fragments below.

“Woah,” he said slowly. “I can see everything. It’s so different. I suppose when we sleep we’re working through the stuff we experienced during the day, so this is a lot more… fluid, even evanescent. These experiences aren’t meant to become memories.”

Minhyun smiled at him. “You figured that out fast.”

“I also go to sleep sometime you know. I have regular human experiences.”

“I know, I know. Of course you sleep. When you aren’t busy with Junior, experimenting with different posit-“

“Let’s just move on, shall we? …Actually, what do you know about me and Junior? We haven’t even made that official. Wait, you don’t go into _our_ dreams, do you?”

“You’re right, we should move on.”

“Minhyun!”

“Moving on now.”

 

***

 

There were more dreams and each one was different and unique and disturbing in some way. Ren had to admit that even knowing what people felt during waking life, it was infinitely stranger what their subconscious could cook up, untamed by rationale.

There were dreams in grayscale, where children rode on demons; dreams made of music; some full of blood and despair; some full of conversations that made no sense and whose participants changed every few moments; one where empires of black rose and were defeated by white ones just to start the cycle anew, happening entirely on a Go board; even senseless amalgams of shapes and noise.

By the end of their run Ren had learned to read the feelings of impossible worlds, perceiving the emotional depths of landscapes and architecture.

“Ren?”

“Yes?”

“I think we’re long past the limits of your reach. The dreams here are so plenty we can’t possibly be using the few huts around the dojo. This is the city.”

They had made it. They had proven that working together could expand Ren’s reach. Back in the real world several hours must have past.

“One last thing,” the empath said, “before we wake up. I want to see if I can make Conmotes in here.”

He grabbed the dreams and shaped them into desires – compressing the layers between individual sleeper’s experiences. But nothing happened. Ren spent a few more moments trying but even though he felt as if the Conmote had successfully formed, it slipped from his grasp a second after creation and failed to show up at all.

Minhyun sighed. “I guess your plan didn’t quite work out how we wanted it. But this was just the beginning of our experiments. Next time, maybe we can see if I can hijack your empathy to expand my link to a cluster the size of your reach.”

“Sure. So… How do we wake up?”

“That’s the fun part. Aaaand… woops!”

Minhyun shoved his friend to topple him. Ren dropped out of the scape.

When he opened his eyes, the two of them were completely surrounded.


	29. Nightmare Journal (3)

_[Some ultra-violence in this chapter. Not gratuitous, but it probably counts as gore.]_

“What happened?” Ren was looking up from his spot on the floor.

Two…three…five… _seven_ Conmotes of varying color and consistency stood around the dojo. Motionless except for the wobbling of the fog they were made from, the silent creatures had no particular order to themselves, distributed at random.

“Ren, did you make those?”

“Well, obviously. But I didn’t know that I… Wait, these could be the ones I made in the scape. That would explain why I can’t control them. They’re probably devoid of purpose. No matter what I do, I can’t give them orders. But that also means I can’t dismiss them. Do you think we’ll have to declare this building contaminated and burry them? That would be weird.”

“Maybe if you leave they’ll vanish when you get out of reach. We cou-“

The door opened. As the entering guard saw the two boys on the floor and the constructs around them, he froze for a moment. But Ren could tell he had something important to say. The guard shook his head in denial. “I’ve gotten a message from Junior. The future changed for the immediate area and it has something to do with those.”

He pointed at the Conmotes.

With superhuman speed a dark red one – made of Resentment – dashed at the man and slashed his disfigured claw-hand upward.

For a second there was no further movement. Then blood poured from a line reaching from the guard’s right leg up to his forehead. An ugly slurping sound accompanied the halves as the bisected man fell apart.

The other Conmotes moved with limbs and joints at impossible positions, horridly elongated and twisted appendices forcing them into hobbling positions as they made their way towards the exit. Resentment was the first to step out, walking over the two corpse halves. Envy and Defensiveness followed with their typical, comically unsubtle postures. Guilt was the only one looking back at all.

Footsteps echoed through the antechamber as armed operatives stormed the building. Ren wanted to call his boyfriend and realized he had sixteen unread message from Junior. Then he was surrounded by hell.

 

***

 

The rapid gunshots echoed in the empty chamber followed by the scattering of wood chippings where the bullets hit the walls after passing through the Conmotes. The first grenade set the dojo’s main room ablaze, the second one detonated in the corridor.

Ren couldn’t see past the fire but if the screams were any indication then the horrid ripping sound was one of human flesh being torn.

Cut off from the fighting soldiers and the fleeing Conmotes, the boys rushed to the back exit to escape the growing fire. Ren tried to assess the emotions of the operatives that were engaging the constructs, hoping to join them with new ones he could control. Though only seconds had past, the fighters were already dead. And there were not enough people around to form more Conmotes. The isolation that should have protected them kept him from building the defenses he needed.

Minhyun’s anxious distress was enough for one construction. The tall, shivering creature of dirty white mist lifted the boys and ran with legs that carried it faster than a regular human could hope to be.

In the Conmote’s arms, Ren found the breath to call Junior. The precog picked up before the first ring, knowing to expect the call.

“Ren? I sent them in with all the ammunition they could grab, but it changed nothing about the future. It’s too late.”

“I know,” the empath yelled into the receiver.

“Can you make it back?”

“Yes, but everyone else is dead. Weapons do nothing. But I think they only attack when provoked.”

“What happened?”

Right, Junior could see the bloodshed that might unfold, but he hadn’t been in contact with anyone who could tell him what the things he saw even  _were_.

“I think,” Ren began, unsure how to explain himself, “I made Conmotes that aren’t connected to me. They might be free agents. My babies have gone rogue.”

Junior gasped lightly. “How do we- Do you have an idea what to do?”

“We’re trying to get back, first of all. You need to figure out where the rogue Conmotes are going. Then I need people so I can make some more. Ones that I can command this time. We’ll see if that’s enough.”

“Understood.”

As Minhyun’s distress began to fade, Ren had the Conmote put them down before it vanished. They were right at the entrance to the provisional head quarter.

 

***

 

Being only a side base where larger operations passed through but were never concocted, the recourses at their disposal were limited. All five boys had found their way into the multipurpose room at the center of the complex where the operative team had assembled a task force.

They were looking at a screen showing footage from a drone they had sent out to search for the escaped rogues.

It was most disturbing to see his own creations from above, standing eerily frozen in mid-walk, right next to the path, clearly not aware that there was any difference between flat ground and the declining, overgrown terrain. How alien emotions where, Ren through, without the mind to guide them.

Then Defensiveness saw the drone and ducked behind vegetation. Resentment picked up a stone. No person could have thrown with such accuracy. The drone went down.

A collective groan went through the room.

Junior sucked in air sharply, his face grimacing. “We have to evacuate. They’re coming here. Let’s try blowing up the base once they’re inside. We can’t let them escape into the city. I’m not sure we can make it out without losses. Get everyone to the trucks. We’ll take the helicop- _No_!”

He looked up and everybody’s gaze followed his. As nothing happened it occurred to Ren that the boy was already seeing an event that was about to occur. Anticipating Junior’s wish, he flipped through the channels until he found the camera that was stationed on the roof. A construct had climbed the wall and was currently approaching the aircraft. Ren recognized it as Envy – the head motion jerky, the hands always half raised, the back hunched.

The faceless being slammed its fists into the helicopter’s motor over and over.

Junior mumbled “We’re not making it out without losses. I’ll try to see what gives us the best chances. But we should still self-destruct.”

Ren zapped through the channels again. The main force of rogues was at the front entrance. It was only a façade to make the building appear like an office for the phantom company as which the Japanese branch posed. There were two lone guards. One already headless, the other with Resentment’s arm reaching through his stomach.

 _They were coming_. Three from the front, two from the back, one from above. Weapons were useless.

And Ren couldn’t possible engage all three forces at once.


	30. Nightmare Journal (4)

_[Some more violence towards the end of this chapter. Mostly offhand mention.]_

Junior flipped through the surveillance channels, surely looking for the best strategy.

“Aron,” the precog said, “front entrance, engage at will. Minhyun, keep us in contact. Baekho, on standby. Mister Matsumoto, what building is this?”

“We’re in block B,” the head of department answered.

“Evacuate A and C through the underground carpark. Get everyone away from the lower floors of B until Aron has cleared a path. Collect the civilians of block B in the cafeteria. Who is chief of operations?”

A gray haired man with three stripes on his uniform-like jacket raised his hand. “Officer Sato, at your service, Sir.”

“Get every piece of firepower in the arsenal and arm the agents. No guns. Everything that explodes. Who has the activation code for the self-destruct?”

“That,” Officer Sato said, “would also be me.”

“Ren, come with me. We’ll get the chief to the basement.”

Ren followed his boyfriend-turned-battle-commander outside and they flanked Sato between them. Two more operatives accompanied them with grenade launchers. The troop rushed along the corridor of the fourth floor while speakers everywhere in the building echoed the escape plan and mobilization orders.

Already Ren did his best to focus on the civilians gathering in the biggest room of the building one floor below them. They would be difficult to reach once they were a few more floors down but if Ren kept his focus they might be enough for a few Apprehensions to aid in the fight.

Aron sent “I’m almost up there. Do I just kick it down? That won’t hurt a Conmote, will it? I don’t want it to join the ones below.”

“If you can,” Junior sent back, “occupy it. It can still be trapped. Only as long as it takes to claw itself free but we just need to buy time.”

He looked over to Ren as they reached the staircase. “That’s all we’re doing anyway. The destruction of the building will stop them for a while but not forever. We still need to work this out.”

“I think,” Ren said, “the only way to fight the rogues is to use controlled Conmotes, but that requires that the people aren’t evacuated. Can we hold off on that until we got a chance to try?”

“Hard to say,” Junior said, as they reached the first floor. “Depending on how difficult the path to the basement will be, we might have to engage. There’s a twenty percent chance tha- _Get down_!”

The boy threw himself into Ren and pressed them both against the staircase wall. The agents froze, then dropped to the ground. The other wall collapsed to huge slabs of rubble as a bent metal bar the length of a room broke through it. The lobby became visible on the other side of the hole before dust filled the space. Then the staircase fell apart.

Ren was grabbed by the officer and swung up the stairs just as they crumbled away under his feet. Junior held onto the handrail as he lost the ground under him and climbed up to Ren and the troop struggling to get higher through the dust.

The civilians above them had fully assembled. Their level of apprehension was exactly the stable, unceasing source Ren needed. Gray-ish Conmotes shimmered into existence through the clouds of cement dust – five of them – and awaited orders.

“Junior, do we need to fight?”

He got his answer delivered by furniture. The front desk came flying towards the hole that the bar had created. One Apprehension threw itself in its way and redirected the path of the glass and wood piece with its weight, getting flung back for its effort.

Junior coughed from the dust and gave orders through the link instead. First Ren’s constructions helped them all down to the ground level where the two attacking rogues were slicing through pillars. The minimalistic hall of glass and steel had turned into a ruin, but the rogues showed no sign of slowing down.

Aron sent “It’s gone. The rogue from the roof buried through my titanium prison. I think it’s on the sixth floor, still, but I’m not fast enough.”

“Alright,” Junior sent as the ten of them – five humans, five Conmotes – ducked behind turned over sofas. “Collapse the northern wall. See if you can build a ramp or something. Baekho, start flying people out.”

The precog hesitated for a moment, then mumbled “Yeah, should work. Ninety-five percent.”

Resentment and Greed were taking apart what was left of the hall, uncaringly moving towards the hole where they had demolished the staircase.

“Ren?”

“Yes?”

“Hit them with everything you’ve got before you run out of juice. We’re trying a run-by. Stay close to me.”

Trusting Junior’s ability to see attacks coming, Ren sent his Apprehensions into battle. The five grotesque figures swarmed the two rogues, grabbing rubble while running and pelted their enemies. It didn’t do much, but it was a functional distraction. Then the building trembled as the northern wall moved away from the rest of the masonry. Steel carriers tore and concrete split with loud complaints as Aron repulsed six levels worth of stonework.

Through the rising dust, the rogues retaliated. Pieces of pillars and loosened slabs of floor – bigger than any human could have lifted – came flying towards the troop. Junior directed Ren who sent his Apprehensions on intercept courses, flinging themselves into the projectiles. Meanwhile the three agents made a run for the basement gate.

Ren kept two Conmotes on intercept duty and had the other three slice tiles from the ground to use like shuriken. Together the boys followed the chief and his bodyguards.

Outside, through where the wall was missing, Aron appeared at some distance, transported there by Baekho who vanished again. The American boy transmuted the concrete into a twisting slide that reached out of view, likely to serve as escape for the civilian workers of the organization. Which left Ren with precious little time.

They had reached the door but it was too warped from the damage to the building and didn’t open after the chief slid his key card through. But the men were trained soldiers and felt more anger than fear at the rogues, allowing Ren to construct a short-lived but effective Conmote to slash through the steel gate without drafting the ones engaging the rogues.

“Junior,” Ren asked over the sound of screeching metal, “Why the basement anyway? Why don’t we just let Aron level the building?”

The precog kept pointing where the next attack was to follow, allowing Ren to keep the rogues occupied. He spoke through the link to let the others know. “Aron can’t do the destruction for us because the explosives in the building are set up in such a way that it will look like a gas explosion pared with shoddy materials. And we have a lot of sensitive data on servers and in files. Those need to be destroyed beyond repair. The chances for Aron to get it all right and still keep it a secret are minimal.”

Ren had to admire the prudence. Well, besides the usual Junior-sees-the-future type of foresight. The troop was ready to step through the hole in the door. The superpowered boys stayed behind to keep the rogues from following into the basement.

“Guys, something happened,” Minhyun sent, “The rogue from the roof made it into the cafeteria and then suddenly vanished. Just like when Ren dismissed these things.”

Envy was gone. Why?

The arc Aron had built reached from the complex to the border of the fenced area and Ren could feel his powers waning as people escaped his range. He was down to four of his creations and his resources were dwindling. But the assault by the rogues had calmed down. Which was also strange since they should not have been able to recognize a situation as futile and adjust tactics.

Resentment had changed. It was Neglect now. Together with Defensiveness the attackers had become less eager to engage. How could a rogue change? They weren’t bound to-

“Listen,” Ren shouted into the link, “they’re not free agents. The rogues are connected to the people whose dreams I visited. I think the one from the roof vanished when the person woke up.”

“Where are these sleepers?” Junior asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere in the city.”

“Then the original plan stands. The complex isn’t salvageable anyway. And the explosion should wake half the city up. Yes! I see these two go away if we do that. Perfect. Let’s hope you haven’t visited anyone permanently comatose.”

Two more of Ren’s controlled Conmotes vanished. Baekho reported the evacuation almost complete. Minhyun gave everyone an update. Agents at the back entrance had demolished the corridors there enough to trap the rogues and were now also on the way out. Half the armed personnel had fallen in that fight. In a minute Baekho would grab Minhyun from the command center and the collapse could be done without further losses.

Junior shouted “Wait no. _No_! Tell them to go back. They can’t come through- argh.”

The fleeing agents came in, attempting to escape through the front entrance. Or at least the hole where the north wall had been. But Neglect stepped in their way and lazily hacked two at once into pieces. As the remaining five men turned around to run back, Defensiveness blocked their retreat and pelted them with its fists at inhuman speed.

The last Anticipations under the empaths control vanished. Junior pulled Ren away from the scene and down into the basement.

The encircled operative’s screams echoed through the dark staircase.


	31. Nightmare Journal (5)

Minhyun informed them that everyone was out, including him. The three men and two boys in the basement were the only ones left. At least two rogues were behind them, if the buried ones hadn’t been able to dig themselves out yet.

Ren was pulled along as Junior unerringly rushed through the corridors. It was completely dark since the damage to the structure had cut out the electricity. How were they navigating? Was Junior’s sense telling him his chances of crashing into brickwork? Ren was about to pull his phone out for light when he remembered that he had superpowers.

Junior’s love wasn’t enough for a complete Conmote right now – at least not a useful one Ren could create while running and exhausted – but it sufficed for a convenient light source.

Soon a small orb giving plenty of soft, orangey-pink light trailed above them, made of foggy material like Ren’s earliest experiments.

A few more corners through the semi-dark with Minhyun’s continued updates in the back of their heads, and the boys reached the trio at the massive entrance of something that looked a lot like a bank vault.

The chief – Mister Sato – was typing into a keypad, the other two agents guarding his back. They had nothing but the grenade launcher’s inbuilt flashlight to let them see who was coming. Ren’s construction illuminated their stern faces.

“Junior Sir, we are ready to collapse.”

“Good,” Junior said, a bit out of breath. “Set the timer to two minutes. That still leaves us with a hundred percent escape chance.”

The boy walked up to the vault door and put his thumb on a finger print reader. With the hauling of a motor running on emergency power, the gate swung open. A seemingly endless corridor stretched far into the ground.

Ren asked “Is this an escape route?”

“No,” Junior said, already walking through the gate, “This leads to a panic room that won’t collapse. We have to sit this one out.”

“Won’t we be trapped if the building collapses?”

“We have Aron.”

“Right.”

“That reminds me,” Junior said, switching to sending through the link. “Aron, you have one minute thirty seconds until the explosion. Do something that makes noise simultaneously. We have to wake up a city.”

“Understood,” the American sent back.

Then the group entered the bunker. Stone walls, metal grids and hard furniture gave the room an extra claustrophobic feeling. If the huge amounts of concrete above them weren’t enough to do that. Emergency lights turned on as the door closed behind them. Ren whisked away the Love orb, outshined by the harsh neon tubes.

Then they waited.

Still, Minhyun kept them updated. The rogues that had been wrecking the lobby had walked further into the building, which was a case of luck. Although Aron probably could have stopped them if they had tried to escape.

Block B went down in flames. The rumbling rose slowly to a crescendo. For a moment Ren thought himself in the stomach of a hungry giant. Dust fell from the ceiling. Anything not bolted to the stone ground rattled in place.

Then it was over. Of course the surface would look like a warzone and Ren figured the ruins were probably on fire. They’d see. The five people in the buried panic room waited while Minhyun and Aron tried to find their position according to Junior’s senses.

As far as it could be confirmed, the rogues were gone. And whatever Aron had added, it had made a sound that caused windows to shatter even outside the fenced area. Ren’s hunch had likely been the right solution.

“I think,” he said towards Junior, ”we should monitor our future experiment a lot more closely. If we do any at all.”

“Yeah," the leader answered, "I should have stuck around.”

“It’s not your fault,” Ren quickly insisted. “You have the whole organization to run.”

“That reminds me. We need new headquarters. Again. Mister Sato, once we’re back on the surface I want you to contact our remaining bases. We don’t have any big ones left so we’ll build one. I’ll need proposals from the department leaders.”

The chief of operations nodded grimly. Ren assumed the man would have to stay behind and rebuild his own base as well.

“Is that much of a problem?” Ren asked, to kill time and because he had realized that he understood very little of Junior’s role in the organization.

The precog shrugged. “We can build as many bases as we want. I’ll have to be a bit less soft on the stock market manipulation, but a billion here, a billion there, are easily liquidated.”

“How rich are you, exactly?” Ren was curious but careful in case this was a sore spot for the leader.

“Hard to say. Money isn’t all that counts. If I wanted I could easily outmaneuver all other investors on the planet and become the wealthiest man that ever lived. Did you know that most of the exchange volume is handled by artificial intelligence? Even split seconds of processing time can make a difference of trillions of dollars. I only need to see a minute ahead and can beat them all and take over the world before they figure out what to do about me. Of course that’s not in our interest when it comes to secrecy.”

“Woah.” The implications were stunning. But that was for another day. If more people learned about Junior – especially the superrich – the Shadow would find powerful allies.

“Money isn’t everything, though,” Junior continued, “I am owed a lot of favors. Being able to warn people – important people – of impending doom creates a lot of goodwill. Then there are assets the organization has held onto for a while like a small fleet of ships or a few hundred decommissioned warheads. Anyway, it’s all falling apart now.”

“Why?”

“Because you guys insisted on turning us into a charity organization.”

“Are… are you not alright with that?”

Junior hugged the empath, putting his head on Ren’s shoulder. “It’s what I’ve always wanted. Taking from the rich and giving the poor. Though, it turned out a lot more complicated that the little boy I once was figured. But the board of directors is crumbling. They’d rather jump off than stick with an organization that redistributes wealth from the world trade volume to third world countries.”

“So. Let them jump. Good riddance.”

“They’re influential billionaires. I might not need their money but their contacts are what kept the organization running smoothly. I’ll have to find my own security experts and- Ugh. I’m turning into a bureaucrat.”

Ren chuckled. For a moment he was tempted to tell the boy he’d have to cut his video gaming sessions short.

Aron dug into the bunker, burning away the stone wall as if it was paper. He stepped in through the huge, perfectly round hole. “One escape route in five minutes or less, as ordered.”


	32. Healing Time - E

There was no question that Aron was overpowered. He could have turned a mountain to gold and bought himself a country. He could have turned a mountain to bread and _fed_ a country. Hell, he could just have taken down the White House with a single thought and declared himself eternal emperor of the United States.

Sometimes he considered those options. Especially in times like these when he felt horribly overqualified for the task assigned to him. Not that it was easy, just so excruciatingly boring. Lots and lots of paperwork.

Nuest and the surviving staff had relocated to a hastily assembled new headquarter, built in record time on top of a pre-existing, recently abandoned military base surrounded by mountains fifteen minutes away from Jade-Lion-City.

They were in China now, having felt that both the Korean and the Japanese branch deserved a while to recover in peace.

So it came that Aron – and a dozen Chinese agents – sifted through unsurmountable masses of spreadsheets, databases and contracts, trying to find irregularities in global financial transactions. The Shadow had money – with the futuristic equipment, the henchmen and the many false leads, it was impossible to overlook. And that wasn’t even considering all the facilities that might still be hidden.

Other than the organization which had been designed to serve as money maker and only had to do some generic obfuscating, the Shadow must have gone to great length to stay stealthy. There was no trace of how any of the phantom companies or underground labs had been created anywhere.

Aron couldn’t complain, exactly. He _had_ asked for something to do, but this wasn’t what he had expected.

Although progress was slow on other fronts as well, so he wasn’t missing out on anything. There had been another radio signature in the Andean Mountains, but as soon as a team from the organization was even in reach, a huge explosion destroyed everything. The resulting rock avalanche hit a village. An earthquake in front of the Australian coast seemed to be another abandoned Shadow facility, since the quake’s source wasn’t on a fault line and the intensity fit. They were losing traces, even before they had them.

But the most frustrating part wasn’t the sitting around, or even the spreadsheet reading that made his eyes water. No, it was the fact that their team had discovered five different cases of blatant corruption in the amount of billions. And they had explicit orders to do _nothing_.

The American couldn’t fault Junior’s logic. The more they interfered all across the globe, the easier it would be to for the Shadow to find them again. Regardless, Aron kept a little notebook with names of people he would visit once this was all over.

Groaning softly, he leaned back against a stack of boxes filled to the brim with folders that were in turn overflowing with paper they had yet to investigate.

Jason was distributing coffee.

How strange, Aron thought, that the exuberant, young man who was clearly Chinese and didn’t speak a word of English was called Jason. He would have asked for the story behind it, but – as mentioned – there was a language barrier.

The steward with the English name refilled coffee cups, including Aron’s. The American did his best to say thanks to Jason in Chinese and sipped the lukewarm brew. The biscuits, he declined. He only needed to tear a bit of cardboard off a box and turn it into licorice or marzipan. He picked licorice for now.

“Mind if I join you?” Minhyun dropped to the floor next to him.

“I can’t look at any more numbers,” Aron said instead of answering. He downed the coffee all at once. “They kind of blend together now. There’s a reason I didn’t become an accountant. Besides being an all-powerful transfigurer.”

Minhyun took some of the offered candy and Aron turned his empty plastic cup into a lollipop.

“Junior and Ren left for New York,” the tall healer said with his mouth full of sugar stuff.

“What ever happened to our no splitting up rule?” Aron asked. “Those love birds were the ones who made it up. How come they don’t do as they say?”

“Junior wants to meet every single person working for the organization in a kind of speed dating system. If he looks into everybody’s past or additional information gets triggered, he could finally find every mole and double agent. There are already a few people who didn’t show up to work and have become untraceable.”

“Weird,” Aron said and turned his half eaten lollipop into bubblegum. He threw it high, opened his mouth and would have missed but helped along with a tiny bit of telekinesis. The taste of strawberry was still nearly impossible to imitate, but he was getting better at it.

Minhyun patted the American’s cheek. “Aren’t you getting a bit pudgy? All I ever see you eat is candy. Don’t you have a sugar shock twenty-four seven?”

Aron lazily pointed up and down his esophagus. “It’s not part of my body until it’s digested. I turn it into vitamin rich, low fat protein-concentrate on the way down.”

“That’s… that is just unfair!”

“ _That_ is unfair? Not my ability to create energy from nothing and to turn mud into gold or to explode the head of everybody in this room?”

“Yeah. This one _feels_ unfair.”

Just to rub it in, Aron fashioned a few gummy worms from a pile of paper clips and dropped them in his mouth like a mother bird feeding her young. Jason went around with matcha tea. Spreadsheets were getting read.

Minhyun stretched, his shirt slipping up and revealing his lean mid-section. “If you’re finished for the day we might as well f***.”

A gummy worm got stuck in Aron’s throat and he coughed for air before remembering that he could just turn it into something near liquid to make it go down. “W-what? We… now?”

“Is there a reason to wait any longer?” It was a question that sounded half like honest curiosity and half like teasing. Maybe not half, really, more like ninety percent teasing.

“I- We… I mean we’ve already done it, right? That night when we had a threesome.”

Minhyun made a motion that could have been a shrug or a cringe. “That doesn’t count. I really shouldn’t have stayed in that dream. I was just a bit curious how well-endowed your subconscious imagines me. And then I had to step in and correct you.”

“It _was_ weird to have two of you all of the sudden.”

“But you didn’t send the other me away when I had made you lucid.” One hundred and ten percent teasing.

Aron looked around. “Can we take this conversation somewhere else, I think a few of these accountants might speak Korean.”

“How about we take it to the bedroom?”

 

***

 

_[Mature content for the rest of the chapter. Mostly implication. Nothing graphic or detailed.]_

The move to China had brought with it an upgrade in residence. The boy’s new bedrooms rivaled six star hotels in their luxury. It was Minhyun’s room they had gone to and Aron stood by the door he had just closed behind him.

“Come on,” Minhyun beckoned, walking to the bed without taking his eyes off his guest.

Aron made a few steps. It was true, the dream sex didn’t count. He was nervous. Actually that wasn’t really true. His mind was at piece, his mood was euphoric but his celiac plexus and amygdala kept insisting that it was panic time. Was it a normal occurrence to feel ones fight-flight reflex trigger before f***ing?

Maybe he wasn’t ready. His lower half certainly was sure he _was_ ready – solidly sure. He tried to give himself an internal pep talk but it turned out he wasn’t that good of an orator. Briefly, he wondered what emotions Ren would have read in him.

“Well,” Minhyun said, looking down on him with a gentle smile. “Do something, Mister all-powerful. Where is your great mightiness now?”

Aron swallowed, but the lump in his throat remained. No matter, it was on. If this boy was teasing him, he would bear the consequences.

With a single motion Aron commanded Minhyun’s shirt to move in multiple directions at once. The fabric tore along all seams and rained to the floor in tiny pieces. The mind reader was visibly surprised but steadied himself immediately, his smirk growing bigger. His torso was astoundingly beautiful, the slender, lean muscled body moving with the rhythm of his deep breaths.

Aron made a lifting gesture and sent Minhyun flying backwards. Just when the slender boy was at the highest point in the air, halfway onto the bed, Aron let the rest of the clothes follow the shirt.

Fully naked, Minhyun landed on the soft blanket on the even softer mattress.

Tempted to repeat the trick, Aron instead opted for an even more blatant display of power. His own clothes vanished in bright light as he turned them to plasma.

One big leap and he was on the bed, on top of Minhyun’s legs. The boy looked hungry. What else could Aron do to show off? Well, a few things, but nothing felt desirable. Nothing felt _fitting_.

“You know what?” he said. “I think I don’t like being in charge.”

Minhyun chuckled. “I’ll take over then.”

“Okay, but how would-“

Aron’s mind was hit by a feedback loop and flipped inside out before shattering into a kaleidoscope of shifting experiences only half of which were his. He was Aron on top of Minhyun and Minhyun under Aron. He felt his touch on his boyfriend and his own hand as a foreign object from the perspective of Minhyun’s skin. And of all this he was so overwhelmingly, infinitely _aware_.

“What…”

“Nested links. I forced multiple connections between us.” Aron heard Minhyun’s voice but also felt himself as if he was saying those words. “Every sensation, every thought, every experience will loop back and forth several times, picking up intensity then slowly echoing out.”

“Woah!” There were many things demanding Aron’s attention. But having two erections at once now, made it trivial to pick a focus. Mental communication revealed the mind reader’s masterplan. If they paid a bit of attention to time their orgasms, at least one of them should always be horny, leading to an infinite cycle of turning on the other.

The night was young and so were they. No way would he get any sleep for the next few days. Aron wondered if Jason and his coffee pot did room service.


	33. Dream's Edge (1)

Even Minhyun’s patience had a limit.

After all this time in Nuest much had changed. For example, he had fallen in love. But there had been one – and only one - reason for him to join. And that reason still stood. Sujin.

Junior had promised to use the resources of his organization to aid the search. Minhyun needed to know what had happened to her. Most of all he needed to know if she was alive. His sister had been his everything.

Of course it was perfectly understandable that Nuest had other priorities. Minhyun didn’t need to write a list to see that the sheer weight of all the stuff that had happened greatly outweighed the search for a single person who had gone missing years ago.

But the total lack of results was too much to accept quietly. He knew that the organization had followed all his leads. Every piece of knowledge he had extracted from dreams all across Korea had been investigated. Junior had told him about each one. Kidnapper rings, child slavers, organ thieves. Everything was a dead end, even if the crimes were real. There was no trace of Sujin.

So he began to dreamwalk anew. He hadn’t really done it in a while – not since the disaster at the Japanese base. And of course there wasn’t anything relevant to find here in China. Maybe Minhyun would ask Junior to send him back to Korea for a while, just so he could find new leads. _Someone_ had to know _something_. But until then, this was practice. He couldn’t allow himself to get rusty.

 

***

 

The first dream he found was naturally Aron’s who slept right next to him in the physical world. Minhyun never invaded Aron’s dreams without explicit prior consent these days. Dating a mind reader who could delve through your subconscious every night was surely a bit unnerving. Though the boys trusted each other fully, Minhyun wasn’t going to invade a place as private as the mind unless Aron let him.

 _He_ had insisted on that rule, not Aron.

A part of him wondered if their relationship progressed too fast because they could share their minds every now and then. Was that a sustainable development? They rarely talked about anything, simply mended their psyches together at night. They never really communicated, only saw and sensed and felt. That was going to lead to problems, surely. But what problems?

Flying through the dreamscape was helping Minhyun to clear his head. It was a leisurely stroll through fantastical palaces, apartments and forests. Drifting aimlessly from dream to dream, he paid no attention to their contents or the people who were having them. The void connecting the scape was his path and his destination.

The boy was alone with his thoughts.

_Until he wasn’t._

Never had he met anyone outside a dream, so this came a bit of a shock at first. He was the only one who could access the white, diffuse area between set pieces and he was the only one who could bring people there – hell, if Junior was right, he was the one _creating_ the scape.

And yet, there was a silhouette. Out in the nebulous area between dreams. Far away, almost at the very edge of what Minhyun could still perceive before the void’s foggy nature obscured it. A tiny, humanoid figure, flying perpendicular to him, moving away steadily. There was no frame of reverence for distance but the boy’s avatar still had to physically – or rather metaphysically – cross the scape.

He had all the power of a lucid dreamer at his disposal. The other dream-walker might not have seen him, might even want to avoid him, but he had to try find out more.

Minhyun summoned binoculars from nothing. They were perfectly steady and focused on the vanishing silhouette. It wasn’t enough to resolve the image, so the binoculars became a telescope. The magnification was arbitrarily strong.

Now he could see, in detail, with whom he was sharing the land between minds.

His heart jumped. Even though he could only see her profile and even though it had been years, he recognized her, down to the pony tail. Indubitably. Even the cozy clothes of subdued color were exactly her style.

Sujin was a dream-walker like him. And she was close by in physical reality.

Already, her avatar was drifting off. Minhyun summoned a fancy jet pack he had recently seen in the dream of a science fiction author and flew after her, propelled by flame.

It wasn’t enough. Somehow she must have figured out how to fly faster than at a jogging pace without props. Minhyun had always assumed this limitation to be inherent in the scape’s mechanics and felt anger at himself for never testing this hypothesis.

The next few seconds were spent trying to link with her, but couldn’t find a mind to reach for.

He summoned a Blackhawk helicopter, the fastest thing he had been in recently. Of course he had no idea how to fly it but he just had to imagine it already flying and the lucid powers did the rest. It still wasn’t enough. Sujin was slipping into the fog.

Minhyun set off a nuclear explosion.

The detonation kicked a few dozen people out of the scape, causing them to awaken abruptly wherever they slept. But the sound didn’t carry well inside the void and he wasn’t even sure if he could reach her at all.

Precious seconds remained and then she was gone. But he wouldn’t give in to sorrow. Not while there were options.

 

***

 

“Aron. Aron!”

“Hmpfgl-“

“ _Aron, wake up_!”

“Wha-?”

 “Get up you lazy bastard. In which room is Junior staying?”

“Huh?”

“Ugh. You’re useless.”

Minhyun shoved his feet into fuzzy slippers and rushed out of the room in his underwear. But not without turning on the light, causing his boyfriend to groan in pain.

He did some estimations as he walked along the corridor in search for the stair case’s light switch. There was no way Sujin was on the new head quarter’s grounds. And those had been built in the middle of nowhere. She was likely in one of the surrounding settlements, but that could include a radius of an entire province. If she had learned to fly that fast and kept moving in a straight path she could cross vast distances. And that was assuming she had gone to sleep at the beginning of night time and wasn’t flying through the scape since earlier in the day. But how likely was it that she kept moving straight ahead with no diversion? What would be the point of that?

Flicking on the corridor’s light switch, he saw no reason to wait for the neon tubes to catch on and just made his way up the metal stairs. His mind was still reeling from the realization.

His sister had the same powers he had. Was that likely? There was no data since nobody else had ever mentioned siblings. Had Junior ever claimed that he knew them to be the only ones for sure? Minhyun didn’t recall.

Nuest’s leader wasn’t in his bed. Or even his room. It looked practically uninhabited.

He should have really tried to get to know the base instead of doing the do with Aron every free second of the day. With no clue where the other’s rooms were located he did the next logical thing.

It was rude and reserved for emergencies but he couldn’t exactly ask for permission when they were still asleep.

Minhyun forced four minds into a link with his.

“Wake uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!”

Once he felt the boys violently slammed into the waking state, he sent “Everybody. Conference room. Now.”

 

***

 

One in the morning. Harsh lights reflecting off a polished table into the faces of tired boys.

“I found my sister.”

Baekho froze mid-yawn. Ren was taken aback. Junior, in particular, was extra shocked, his eyes looking like they were about to pop out of his head.

The boys in pajamas and various stages of undress – Aron had brought Minhuyn’s shirt with him, mindfully – sat around the oval desk in a lavishly furnished, modern glass cube of a conference room, surrounded by nightly abandoned office space.

“You… entered her dream, I’m guessing?” Ren spoke up.

“No, she has my power, too. She’s a dream-walker. And a better one than I am for that matter. She moved faster than I thought was possible. I couldn’t reach her in time.”

By now Junior seemed to wear a permanent look of despair and confusion. What was his problem? Did he not like it when he wasn’t the one supplying unknowable information?

“I estimate,” Minhyun continued, “that she’s not too far from here. We have to look at the cities in the area. The whole province at worst. Surveillance footage, traffic cameras, asking people in the streets. Make it happen, Junior. But for the moment I’d like- Junior, are you even listening?”

The leader had been staring blankly at the table. Apparently the boy was useless without a cup of coffee. Well, they probably all were. Minhyun did his best to slow down his breathing. They had time. She was around here. They would find her. He had to believe it.


	34. Dream's Edge (2)

It had only been one day and Minhyun had to admit that everybody seemed quite active. The whole building was buzzing with operatives organizing the search. There were multiple channels of varying legality they used to acquire all the footage from cameras across the province and it would take a while. Usually the agents were tasked with making information _vanish_ , especially pertaining to the existence of Junior and the organization itself, but getting information and filtering it was often included in that task. In short, the people on the case knew what they were doing.

And that’s why Minhyun felt useless. He had created a picture of Sujin with the help of a forensic artist and then aging software had confirmed the result based on photographs he still possessed and carried with him everywhere.

What else was there to do?

He tried to find some rest until nightfall. The trance chamber was almost finished. These Chinese knew how to build stuff in no time.

Not that there was much to construct. The chamber was one of the bigger rooms in the head quarter, soundproof since half an hour ago. Five beds stood in a lose circle. There was a desk for an overseeing medical professional and a direct line to the chief of operations. Fairly simple stuff.

Now that he thought about it, he was really lucky the boys weren’t just guys he worked with, but genuine friends. They had agreed to help him without question. He didn’t know how slim the chances were but there was no way he wouldn’t try to find her in the scape. He’d have gone alone if need be.

“Hey, whatcha doin?” Aron said in English as he hugged him from behind. The American rested his head on Minhyun’s shoulder, which the height difference made pretty much the ideal position.

“Trying not to lose my mind. What if she’s already on the move? Or if she only visits the dream scape very occasionally or if- eek!”

Aron nibbled on his boyfriend’s neck. “You worry too much.” More nibbling. “Let me take your mind off all that.”

Minhyun turned around to make lip contact. They found a quiet corner away from the construction work to make out. He poked on Aron’s consciousness and was beckoned in. They chatted mentally while their saliva exchange occurred.

“I think Junior’s not happy with all this,” Minhyun sent. “Any idea why?”

“Do we have to do this now? Our tongues are kind of preoccupied.”

“So?”

“That’s a signal for you to shut up. Normal couples don’t carry conversations while hooking up.”

“Normal? In a normal relationship I wouldn’t have to worry about my boyfriend turning the entire bed into gingerbread hearts with frosting while I’m in it.”

“Oh come on. That was romantic _and_ hilarious.”

 

***

 

Night fell eventually. It wasn’t fully dark out but in the depth of the complex where the trance chamber had been built there were no windows.

Five beds, five boys, five sleeping pills, five glasses of water to wash them down.

Doctor Feng supervised the experiment. Her task was to monitor the heartrates of Nuest and shock them awake if some unforeseen event made the effort too dangerous to continue. Ren manifesting Rogues came to mind. The doctor dimmed the lights, made sure all sensors were firing and gave a thumbs up. Jason was assisting her, to make sure there was always someone in the room with the sleepers.

Minhyun had never needed a pill to fall asleep but there was no reason to wait for his body to become naturally tired. He swallowed the medication and handed his empty glass to the confidently smiling Jason, who went around collecting them.

He fell asleep so fast it was disorienting. This was no regular sleeping pill like the one he had used in the dojo with Ren – this was hard stuff.

The void gobbled him up rather than softly enveloping his mind. It even took a few seconds for him to manifest as his avatar, leaving his mind disconnected and stuck in place at first. Sleeping pills of that caliber, he concluded, made for a terrifying experience.

Four nebulous bubbles appeared around him. He didn’t even wait for these proto stages to develop into actual dreams, which might have taken several minutes.

He reached into the bubbles, using a link nested within the scape, and shouted repeatedly “You’re all dreaming. Snap out of it. We’re on a mission.”

One by one he saw the boys pop into existence as avatars within their foggy, little zones. He reached in and pulled them out individually, starting with Aron.

The American boy’s avatar was in his pajamas while Ren’s wore casual, practical clothing. Junior had chosen a suit and Baekho looked like he was going to the beach. For the first time Minhyun realized that he himself always put the same comfy jeans-sweater-combo on his own avatar.

 “So this is the scape,” Junior said, looking around. “Kind of like an inverse night sky, I’d say. All white except for the dimmer, flickering spots in all directions.”

“Wait, haven’t you already seen it?” Baekho asked. “I remember Minhyun saying you found him while he was walking around here.”

Junior used the de facto lack of gravity for some elaborate spinning. “Nope. Never been here. I had to wait until he wandered into my dream. If I could come here by my lonesome once he constructs the place, I’d have tranced instead of drugging myself to sleep like the rest of you.”

“Alright listen,” Minhyun said, “I have no clue how the mechanics of this place work once I’m not close to you anymore. If you manage to cross the edge of the scape you might just start dreaming or you might wake up. Or perhaps there is no edge. Maybe we’ll find out. Rule number one, don’t enter any dreams. Looking in from the outside is fine, though. Rule number two, keep your eyes out for anyone who’s moving between dreams, but this is mostly an attempt to figure out how to approach the search, rather than the actual search.”

“Rule number three,” Junior said, with a smile, “No Conmotes, Ren.”

The empath glared. “Oh you little-“

“Hey,” Aron said, ”can we get started? The first thing we have to do is come up with a search pattern. The second thing is, well, search.”

Junior rubbed his chin in a playful ‘thinking’ gesture. “Hm, this space is three dimensional. That complicates things.”

“Not really,” Minhyun said.

“Yes, really. That complicates things massively.”

The dream-walker shook his head. “No, I mean, it’s not really three dimensional. It's a disk. The dreams are sorted in clusters and bundles that are distributed across a certain thickness. But there comes a point where there are no more dreams along one axis. Were probably seeing all the ones above and below right now. The scape is only infinite to the sides. Although it might wrap around like the earth. That’s kind of my hypothesis. Distances usually correspond roughly. Like, two dreams right next to each other means those people share a bed.”

“Then we can use two-dee search patterns,” Junior said. “Spiral makes no sense, because we’re looking for something arbitrarily far away. Zone search doesn’t work because we have no predefined area. Same thing with grid.”

“We just spread out then?” Baekho said with a shrug. “There’s not even a point in making sure we’re not looking at the same spot twice because she might be hidden inside a dream when we pass by.”

Minhyun hadn’t even thought of that. He really needed to figure out if there was a way to survey more of the scape at once. Some kind of beacon? Or sensors? Things only existed as long as he paid attention to them. That was an unfortunate consequence of lucidity power.

“Fine,” Minhyun said, “Might was well go around at random. You can move faster by using a vehicle. Oh right, Baekho, Junior, you’ve never been here. You can have anything you want by thinking of it. Good luck. I’ll keep us linked, think out loud if there’s something to report.”

Baekho pulled an apple out of nothing to test his power and looked quite pleased with himself. Ren whispered to Junior, “Who made Hyunnie the leader here?”

Minhyun ignored the comment, summoned his trusty helicopter and picked a direction. Behind him, the others spread out.

 

***

 

He estimated they were about one real world hour in. So far, nothing.

They moved in straight lines, in waves, in spirals. Every now and then Minhyun checked back but no one had anything interesting to report. He had taken a moment to test if there was any light source he could summon that penetrated the eventual fade out. He was beginning to think that the area he couldn’t see might not even exist. Maybe he wasn’t creating the scape all at once, but dynamically as he moved in it.

Time to check in again. “Anyone seen anything, yet?” he sent into the link.

“Nope,” Ren sent.

“I made myself sunglasses,” Baekho sent, “I can only recommend it. Makes the void much easier on the eyes.”

“I can make really good strawberry flavored gum here,” Aron sent. “Ten out of ten, better than my real powers.”

There was a lengthy pause. Minhyun made sure he hadn’t forgotten to include all of them. But no, the missing boy simply hadn’t said anything. “Junior? What’s up?”

“I’m here,” the leader sent, “I wanted to look at the disk of dreams from above. So I flew up until I could see as much as possible at once. I think the fog might be thinner here. This could be a viable tactic. And…”

“And?”

“Say Minhyun, have you ever noticed that the dreams move?”

“What?”

“They all move in the same direction, very slowly. I had to stay still for a while to see it. I’d like you to come up here and make sure it’s not just me drifting involuntarily.”

This was all new information. He never had a reason to go far above – or below – the scape, so the variable thickness of the fog was precious knowledge. The movement not so much.

“If they all move in the same direction,” he speculated, “could this be the earth’s rotation?”

Junior grunted mentally. “It _is_ a rotation, alright. But there is no curvature in the dream disk. It’s more like a galaxy. I think… the scape has a center. Have you even been there?”


	35. Dream's Edge (3)

Even with their mode of transport it took over an hour to get there.

The boys had created a space shuttle with a glass bottom to see the scape as they flew above it, driven by the ten hypersonic jet engines tacked onto the shuttle’s wings. It certainly would have made no sense to travel this way in real life, but none of them had any idea which vehicle would have been faster than this according to dream logic. If there was one.

As they moved along, the nature of the disk changed. It grew thicker and the dreams clustered up more, leading to filament-like structures reaching from side to side in the disk.

Junior leaned back in his recliner, looking down through the glass. “When we get out I’ll look up the trigonometry to find the center of a disk from its rotation. Now that we know the void isn’t isomorphic we might find a way to teleport there. If teleporters can exist in dreams there should be nothing preventing it. I’d rather not have to travel there every time.”

“Why should we come back there?” Baekho asked. “We don’t even know if anything interesting will be at the center.”

“It’s a much better starting point for any search because it gives us a point of reverence. And who knows it might act as a Schelling point for Sujin.”

“A what?”

The leader gestured at the outside as seen through the cockpit window. “If you had to meet someone in a huge area but no way of communicating, where would you wait for them to show up? At an unmissable landmark. That’s a Schelling point. And nothing here stands out like the center.”

“Wait,” Baekho said, turning to Minhyun. “Why didn’t you just link with her while she was in reach?”

Minhyun shrugged. “My mind grasped at nothing. I don’t know where she is in reality. Guess that’s more important than I thought. Or perhaps, if she has the same powers, she could be immune to people poking her mind.”

Ren walked back and forth over the glass floor. “Does all this answer questions or only prompt new ones? I mean, how come Minhyun never noticed that the disk’s thickness varies. If the center is fixed and he creates the scape always with the center at the same position corresponding to physical space, he would have noticed after moving country. So the center always spawns in the same distance from him and with it all structure in the scape. With me so far?”

“Yes,” Junior said.

“Not really,” Baekho said.

“Your point?” Aron asked.

Ren continued. “Assuming Sujin also has the power to create the dreamscape, who takes priority when it comes to establishing the center? We would expect her to have been around at the same time as Minhyun at least a few times, but Minhyun always spawns at the same distance to the middle.”

“Um, guys?” Minhyun said, “I think we’re here.”

 

***

 

It was very obviously the focal point of the scape.

The structures formed by adjacent dreams were so thick that the shuttle had to move as if flying through a natural cave, the dream-cluster’s slowly shifting arrangements leaving only narrow corridors.

Then there were no more dreams. In the area of a rough sphere there was a tiny, golden planet. A softly glowing orb, enticing the boys to come closer – proportions impossible to estimate, somewhere between a marble and a gas giant. It had a complex structure on the outside that might have been shifting or simply been hard to grasp – lines both strongly geometrical and disorderly curved, broken apart by whirls that seemed to rotate whenever the eye wasn’t fixated on them, like optical illusions on a massive scale.

After a minute of deliberation, the boys disintegrated the shuttle. Flying closer on their own, they got an unobstructed look at the orb.

“Any idea how big it is?” Baekho asked. “I feel like it changes size whenever I blink.”

Ren floated closer, almost touching it. “You know you’re just your avatar, right? You don’t have to blink if you don’t want to.”

“I want to. It feels weird not to do all the little things.”

Junior cleared his throat – which was also unnecessary for a dream avatar and only served to gain the group’s attention. “We can keep flying rounds, but I don’t see anything more on the outside than what we’ve already seen. The obvious thing is to try and get inside. Any objections?” Slight murmuring from Aron. A shrug from Ren. “Good. Then let’s find a way. Which one of us are going? Minhyun do you want in?”

“What do you mean?” Minhyun asked. “Won’t we all go?”

The leader grimaced. “Actually… I can’t really say anything against that. There are any number of reasons to split up _or_ to stay together. Let me think. If we all enter there won’t be anyone observing the dream scape which could conceivably cease to exist, kicking us all out. Or we miss Sujin showing up. Or we run into some sort of trap inside and you might be incapacitated so you can’t pull us out if need be. Or the inside- You know what, there’s no telling, really.”

He looked around the area. “No idea how well my future sense works in here, but I don’t see anything happen with more than five percent probability for a while. I don’t really see _anything_ happen as far as it will let me look. Which I suppose is as long as we can possibly stay asleep before doctor Feng pulls the plug. If anyone wants to stay here, I won’t blame you. This is new territory.”

Minhyun hovered closer to the sphere. “I’m going in for sure. This is _my_ territory. I can’t let you go alone in good consciousness.”

Aron flew over to his boyfriend and put his hand on the dream-walker’s shoulder. “And I’m not leaving _him_ alone.”

“I should stay out,” Ren said. “If I use my ability – by accident or because something forces me – we’d have real world consequences that we can’t solve without blowing more stuff up.”

“Then I’ll stay, too,” Baekho said. “Keep us linked, Minhyun. If you’re in danger in there, I’ll nuke the thing from the outside.”

“That’s very reassuring, tiger boy,” Junior sent, now speaking through the link. “Well, then let’s get going. Good luck you two, we’ll keep you updated.”

“Any idea how to get in?” Ren asked.

Junior chuckled. “Actually when you first flew over to this thing there was a ten percent chance you’d just touch it out of curiosity. That’s our way in. But in the timeline where someone goes in, they can’t go back out. I don’t see any horrible pain or other awfulness in the near future though, so… It’s safe for a lose definition of safe.”

There wasn’t much more to do or say. Even though Minhyun knew he could wake up anytime and force the others to do the same, there was a rush of adrenaline as appropriate before taking a step into the great unknown.

Junior took his hand, then Aron’s and dragged them along with the determination of a boy who knew that the future didn’t hold his immediate demise.

The trio slipped into the sphere as if the golden, wobbling exterior was non-existent. No resistance, no sensation. Not even a tingling on the skin.

Then they were someplace else entirely.

 

***

 

Of course Minhyun knew dream logic didn’t care about plausible proportions or keeping spatial relations consistent. Still, it was disorienting to appear in the middle of a golden stone labyrinth with a corridor behind him as if he hadn’t just passed a barrier.

The labyrinth was three dimensional. Escherian architecture made it impossible to declare up and down. Corridors ran at every angle, met and diverged in ways an organic structure grows, but were made from flawless gold bricks. Ivy-like plants grew on the walls, appearing vaguely exotic without being opulent. They mostly served to indicate which one of the walls were meant as a floor by not creeping along that one.

Junior sighed after a moment of taking it all in. “I’m in favor of _not_ splitting up.”

“The place sure seems to want us to do that,” Aron said while Minhyun explained their situation to the boys outside.

The dream-walker conjured a rope that tied the three together at the belts. It stretched infinitely and weighed nothing but would keep them from getting lost in case the walls shifted or something like that.

Quickly the boys agreed to walk a bit to get a feeling for the structure of the maze. All they found were more identical corridors with no rooms or obvious focal points. It took a while for Minhyun to realize that the labyrinth didn’t change the way a regular dream does. It must have been able to exist on its own, outside the subconscious, ephemeral imagination of a sleeper.

The walls were unbreakable by standard means – where standard meant summoning a chisel, a jackhammer, a stick of dynamite and a speeding car that raced down the corridor before smashing into the gold bricks to no avail.

Had they found the center of the scape just to have to find the center of the center? What an exercise in frustration. And they had only half the night or so left before doctor Feng would end the experiment. If they weren’t able to find Sujin they should at least learn as much about the nature of his powers as possible.

“Junior,” Minhyun said slowly, weighing every word. “We’re not making any progress, are we?”

“I suppose not.”

“Doesn’t this call for drastic measures?”

“I guess? Do you have anything I in mind?”

He feared it would sound crazier out loud than in his head, but the idea had formed. Minhyun said “You like science, right?”

“Sure. I play sci-fi games all the time.”

“How vividly can you imagine a black hole?”


	36. Dream's Edge (4)

What precautions could they have taken?

Ren and Baekho wished them good luck and that was that.

The trio stood at one end of the longest straight corridor they had found so far, giving Junior a distance of about a hundred meters to do the deed of unfathomable destruction. Minhyun was convinced they would be safe. After all, they just had to wish to stay in place and so it would be. Even a black hole couldn’t move them from the spot. Probably. Briefly, he wondered how much it would hurt to be wrong.

There was no reason to hesitate and Junior seemed to think so as well. Something happened down the corridor. Space warped, bunching up at the middle between the walls. Vines were torn off their bricks and disintegrated before forming a thin, glowing ring around the tiny pitch black sphere that grew to fist size, then to head size, then filling out the corridor.

Whatever the walls were actually made off, the impossible material ultimately wasn’t meant to be completely physics defying, even in dream logic. Bricks came lose with audible vibrations. They, too, disintegrated on their way into the accretion disk. A particle jet escaped from the middle of the nothingness, shooting plasma down the corridor. If this had been real life the boys would have been killed by it. But, Minhyun reasoned, if they encountered a black hole in real life they would probably have been about to die anyway.

More bricks broke off, creating holes in the walls. They only revealed more corridors, but those also broke apart under the gravitational force.

With loud clacking, entire segments of the maze tore themselves from the structure and fell piecemeal towards the hole.

Minhyun summoned a shield around them. The force field kept fragments from crashing into them while their surrounding fell apart. Already, the hole had exposed four or five levels of the labyrinth and more became visible as pieces broke away.

It was as if the whole thing wanted to come down but some unseen power did its best to hold everything together. The maze collapsed into the hole, a seemingly infinite supply of bricks streaming from all sides. There was a cavity in the structure with a diameter so large it became difficult to see details on the opposite side. Pieces the sizes of skyscrapers fell into the tear in spacetime.

“There!” Aron yelled through the link, unable to get through the clacking noises. He was pointing diagonally downward at a segment that had been exposed a few hundred meters away. “This is different!”

The golden corridor down there was holding up well against the destructive force. A red door at its end was unimpressed by everything happening around it. Even though it was brightly colored, it looked fairly dull surrounded by the shimmering metal walls.

Junior desummoned the black hole.

Silence so thick it was difficult to adjust fell over the boys. Minhyun hadn’t even realized how loud the destruction had been. Probably the sound of several jet engines starting right next to him. Another thing that would have killed them in real life. Oh well.

 

***

 

Aron reached for the doorknob, but froze. The red portal looked remarkably ordinary. Just a wooden, run of the mill door.

“Junior, will I explode into a million pieces if I touch this?”

“Nope.”

“Alright.”

The American boy moved to grab the knob.

“Only a thousand,” Junior said.

Aron flinched back and spun around with terror in his eyes. Junior’s grin grew wider, then he broke into a short giggle fit.

“You,” Aron said with a low voice. “You little…absolute…I’ll get you back for that.”

Minhyun did his best to keep a neutral expression, but was aware he probably failed. Levity was exactly what the situation had needed. He checked back with the outsiders who had nothing to report and by then, Aron had calmed down a little. The boy even smirked a tiny bit, but did his best not to let Junior see.

Defiantly, he grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door open, revealing…

Another corridor. At least this one was normal looking - almost mundane, as if taken wholesale from an upper-class hotel. Big, checkered floor tiles, shining with polish. White walls lacking décor. Neon lights. Lots of red doors – a dozen or so.

Junior sighed as he scratched his neck. “It seems we’ve just found another maze. I wouldn’t be surprised if all these doors led to more corridors. We traded one situation for the exact same one again. Maybe the structure is self-repairing. We destroy one labyrinth, it makes a new one.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic,” Aron said. “We haven’t tried any of the doors yet.”

With confidence the American stepped into the room and–

“Wait!” yelled Junior.

–and fell upward.

Other than the labyrinth, this corridor had gravity. Just the wrong way. Aron plummeted to the ceiling, smashed into it and groaned from the confusion. Minhyun followed him carefully, as did Junior after a second’s trepidation. They stood between the industrial neon tubes.

Aron tried one of the other doors. He found them all locked.

“I could blast them open. I’m just concerned about what’s behind them. We could turn one to glass first. Or to dust.”

Junior stepped up to the door next to which Aron was standing and took one look at the lock before materializing the key in his hand. “You know you can just get whatever you want in your dreams, right?”

“Right. Like that?” The American pulled a pillow from behind his back and pummeled the leader.

“Seriously,” Minhyun said, inserting himself between them. “We have a soft deadline looming over us. Save the pillow fights for waking life. I’d really like to get somewhere before it’s time to go.”

He was all for fun and games, but they weren’t actually making any appreciable progress and his heart grew heavy at the idea that his search was going to end up as fruitless as all the other leads. Not when he seemed so close to a reveal.

Junior slipped the key into the lock, turned it and – with a dramatic look back at his companions – swung the door open.

“Great,” he said, “more of those.”

A corridor like the one they were in was visible through the frame.

Aron threw his hands up as he turned around. “Maybe that’s all this is. The center of the scape is a huge maze. Why _should_ there be anything to find? Maybe it’s all some giant dream clusterf***. Maybe it has no purpose or order. Why would it?”

The leader ruffled his hair. “We need a different approach. I’m still not willing to split up, though.” He tugged at the infinitely elastic band that kept them tied together. “We’re wrecking this place, too. And maybe the one after that. If we just find more labyrinths we give up and continue the search out in the scape. Objections?”

Once again it fell to Minhyun to keep the outsiders informed, while the other boys prepared a slightly less cosmic demolition than last time. If there was a room they didn’t want to destroy it, too. No, this time it was going to be refined by comparison.

Aron constructed cannons – crude, cartoony versions of the war instruments. Junior filled them with special projectiles. Minhyun moved them into position with a wave of his hand. One cannon per door.

On the count of three, dozens of weapons fired simultaneously.

The cannon balls broke through the doors they had been pointed at and kept flying through their individual corridors. They split into identical clones at every junction and smashed every further door they passed. The sound of splintering wood grew more and more distant as the projectiles travelled endless distances, never losing momentum like physics would have demanded.

Nothing revealed itself – until Minhyun saw motion at the far end of the very corridor they occupied. A ponytail? He wasn’t sure. It had been too quick, too far away.

He called his two friends over the link, since the unphysical self-replicator-projectiles still made noise as they kept wrecking doors further and further away.

The trio hurried after the thing Minhyun swore had been there. Climbing over the doorframes – they were upside down after all – the boys made their way through a few adjacent corridors.

They got to the spot.

They found a room.

They looked inside.

They went mad.


	37. Dream's Edge (5)

The room into with the three boys gazed was indescribable. Indeed, it was made from the very essence of indescribability.

Minhyun could _perceive_ it. Deeply. He knew it was there, more than he had ever known anything before. He understood that it was an ordinary room filled with ordinary, familiar things. But none of his human senses registered the slightest input.

Trying to see the room didn’t show darkness, it showed what one would see if humans never had eyes to begin with. The sounds coming from it were normal, unthreatening room noises and yet listening to them was as if his brain had never comprehended sound before – did not even have the proper channels for it.

“It’s beautiful,” Junior’s voice came dully from the side, making its way into Minhyun’s awareness, sounding wrong – _incomplete_.

“What do you see?” the leader asked. “Or, what do you _feel_?”

His own voice was wrong, too, but Minhyun did the best he could to describe the indescribable. “I see… feel floor… or, I _know_ floor. And I know walls. I know the furniture in it. There is a bed and a desk and there are pictures.”

“Yes,” Aron added, “I think ’knowing’ is the right word. I’ve never seen or heard or felt any wall that is so… so _wall_. And the window and the bookshelf and-”

Junior sighed heavily. “Plato thought that all object in the universe that share a quality are instantiations of a universal thing. Every chair is a particular instance of chairness, every dog an instance of dogness, everything red an instance of redness, everything of which there are two an instance of twoness. And ever so forth. I think this is what we’re looking at… or ‘knowing’ at? In here, the platonic universals are real. This isn’t just a room. It’s roomness.”

“What happens if we enter?” Aron asked.

The group’s leader swallowed. “I dare not say. I can’t see past it. Or ‘know’ past it. We’d really need better words for this sort of thing.”

Not much happened for a few seconds. Then the boys took each other’s hands and stepped into roomness together. Their feet made carpet-noisesness over the floorness. Junior let go of Minhyun’s hand and sat down on the bedsheetness draped over the mattressness. If Minhyun looked – or ‘knew’ – closely he could perceive the sheetness’s drapedness.

Aron fiddled the leafnesses of potted plantness. It was all horribly surreal.

Timidly turning to ‘know’ at his surrounding, Minhyun decided to pull open the curtainness. To his surprise it let in sunshineness. Not that it got any brighter. He still didn’t _see_ a thing, beside the other two boys. Even the air had a quality of airness. Absurd, and yet.

“So…” Junior said, “How do we destroy it?”

“What?”

“Come on, Minhyun. How else are we supposed to advance? There are no doors here. We have to take it apart again. Finding this room… _roomness_ , isn’t even progress. There’s nothing in here. Not really.”

They pondered in silence for a moment. Minhyun used the break to inform the outsiders of their predicament. It was hard to make them understand what was going on.

Ren sent back, “Can’t you guys just summon destructionness?”

“I don’t think it’s that simple?”

“Why not?”

“Um.”

They talked it over and agreed there was no harm in trying. Unless one counted damaging the room as harm, which it might be.

As a first attempt, Junior conjured a knife which instead turned out to be knifeness. They knew right away that this was the way to go.

Afraid to summon the universal essence of black holes, they made due with bazookaness, firing projectileness onto the roomness’s wallness, causing huge explosioness’s.

Minhyun was getting a headache from all the abstraction.

A shock swept through the boys. Something indefinite broke. The universals vanished and the world fell apart.

 

***

 

“Foolish boys.” The voice was not accusing him. Its tone was sad more than anything. “What have you done?”

Minhyun looked up. The others were next to him, but the rope was gone. It was dark except for the spot where he and his friends stood as well as one more spot further ahead where a high, white shining throne perched atop an equally pure white hill of what could have been ice or crystals.

There was a woman so bright and glorious, that it hurt to look at her. Through the blinding light it was impossible to tell what she wore, what her face looked like or even the shape of her body. But the ponytail, that was visible in her silhouette.

“Sujin?”

Minhyun took a small step forward.

The shining woman raised her hand commanding him to stop. “Your sister I am not. Perhaps Sujin is among my names for I have oh so many. Centuries of names. Not all forgotten but few ever uttered. You mustn’t be here. You mustn’t return here.”

“Who are you?” Minhyun yelled, too excited to contain himself.

“I am known, as stated, by many names.”

The dream-walker grew impatient. “ _What_ are you?”

The ancient woman’s voice hardened. “Luck. For you and your kind. I am deeply sorry for all my mistakes. Please understand, I’m doing all I can to mend it. I will reveal myself to your kind in time.”

“But my sister-“

“You will not find her here! You will find _nothing_ here. Do _not_ come back. Do not _bother_. You will find yourselves unable to enter anew.”

“But-“

“Farewell, Junior and Aron. Farewell, my dearest son.”

“Please-“

 

***

 

In the trance chamber deep inside the head quarter five boys woke up in their beds too suddenly, as if hit by a gust of cold water. They were greeted by a grinning Jason and a concernedly glaring doctor Feng.

Aron rubbed his eyes. “What was all that?”

“Whatever,” Baekho said, “I’m exhausted. G’night.” He rolled over, pulled the sheets up and went back to sleep.

Minhyun cried. He couldn’t stop himself.

His boyfriend walked over to him and embraced him lovingly. Then the American reached out and turned Junior’s entire bed into the stickiest cotton candy possible. “I said I’d get you back for that.”

Even the screaming leader’s sugar related predicament couldn’t lift Minhyun up. He was heartbroken. And so terribly confused.


	38. Healing Time - F

For a few weeks now the organization had been falling apart and Ren wasn’t too sad about it.

The so called board of directors consisted of useless cowards as far as he was concerned. They were rich folks who had exploited Junior’s naiveté. Now that the Shadow had become a concern and no one trusted anybody anymore, and after the spectacular loss of the Korean and Japanese bases – and after Aron’s not so polite threats – the directors had left one by one. They were only interested in easy money. This wasn’t what they had signed up for.

The European and the Indian branch had disbanded already. The last South African investor had announced his intention to leave. The Japanese had decided not to rebuild at all. Arabia, Scandinavia and Russia had never been big bases and sort of fell by the way side as the rest crumbled.

Junior would be a lot less busy if he had to take care of fewer expenditures and staff members, Ren had been told. The precog could afford, eventually, to spend less time looking at the future of stock.

For now, however, he was inundated with papers. The aftermath of the organization’s slow collapse brought an insufferable amount of bureaucracy upon the nominal leader.

Ren carried a cup of hot cocoa with whipped cream and a stack of soft cookies into the office where the slender boy had fallen asleep, draped over ten thousand pages worth of diversified portfolios.

A shame to wake him up when he had a moment’s peace, but the slumbering boy would get a headache-inducingly stiff neck for days if he kept laying like that.

For a while Ren just watched. He put the tray down and let the cocoa’s aroma permeate the air, observing the slight rise and fall of Junior’s back. The pretty boy’s mouth was a little bit open, like he was about to drool in his sleep.

Ren poked him in the shoulder. Once the leader snorted, his eyes fluttering open, Ren caressed his cheek until the boy had shaken the drowsiness.

Junior smacked his lips. “Wh-what time is it?”

“Noon. You’ve been in here since six in the morning, I think. I haven’t seen you all day.”

“Oh. Thanks for waking me up. And for this,” he pointed at the cup, the weird smirk on his lips that made him strangely look like a dinosaur somehow. Maybe Ren was just imagining it. Who else would pay close enough attention to every detail of Junior’s face to make such odd comparisons?

“Please don’t go back to work right away,” the empath said. “I’m bored out of my mind here. Baekho asked me to train with him, but he’s so aggressive. Minron are intolerable unless you’re into hour long group cuddling.”

“Minron? They have a ship name now?”

“It’s not like you ever see one without the other.”

Junior rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Actually, now that you mention it, there is something I want to try with you and Minhyun. I thought there might be a way to combine our powers into something greater.”

“Haven’t we been through this?”

“No rogues this time. Just passive observation. And we’re staying awake for a change.”

“I don’t know…”

With pouty lips, Junior looked up at his bed buddy. “Please? Pretty please? I need an excuse to get away from this desk for an afternoon.”

Ren sighed. Of course he’d say yes. How could he not? And the fact that Junior knew exactly what the chances were made the defeat all the more humiliating. Out of spite, he stole the biggest cookie.

 

***

 

The three of them picked the library. Yes, the head quarter had a library. Ren hadn’t known until Junior brought them there.

Minhyun wandered between the low shelves while the other two set everything up. There wasn’t much to do. They agreed to sit at a table for now and only transition to the floor if meditation became necessary. Really, their ‘set up’ consisted of choosing the fluffiest cushions to make the hard plastic chairs bearable.

“Alright,” Junior said once they had all settled into a seat. “Combining you two was a terrible mistake. Aron’s powers aren’t really combinable as far as I can think. Baekho’s Twi turns all our powers off. So the only combinations we could still try are between the three of us.”

Ren squinted. “How can you two combine? Seeing into the future of a dream? Wait, you want to try to read people’s minds before they even think what they think?”

“No, that’s not possible the way you imagine,” Junior said. “People being fickle in their heads is the very limit of my ability. I want use exactly that. If you and I can read the general emotions of this place a day from now, or even just a few hours ahead, we could gain a massive advantage over anyone trying to outdo us.”

“How does this interfere with your five percent limit? Wouldn’t you still be unable to- Oh! I see, you think since I can feel emotions no matter how faint-“

“It would go around my limit,” Junior finished the sentence, nodding to himself. “Or so I dare to hope. We’ll see.”

Minhyun clicked his tongue. “Then I guess I’ll link us and we can see if Ren’s sense works through the link. Ready?”

 

***

 

“I feel… I feel… um, I think I feel…” Junior said for the umpteenth time. “Frustration?”

“That’s just mine,” Ren said with an eye roll.

“I didn’t know you could sense your own feelings.”

“I can’t. It’s simply obvious. How long have we been trying?”

Minhyun looked at his phone. He had been texting Aron non-stop, since his participation was completely passive. “Three hours almost on the dot.”

Ren sighed. “There’s no way for us to tell the difference between them. Give up already.”

He was pointing out the problem that had plagued them for the very beginning of the experiment and which they were as far away from solving as ever. There was just no way to tell which emotions Junior might have been feeling through the link – if he was feeling anything at all. Were they present or future emotions? How to differentiate?

At some point they had committed to cause some large scale upheaval at a specific time the next day, just so that there would be a distinct emotion in the near future. It was a nice idea, but yielded no results. There was no way to say how far in the future Junior’s emotion-sense would extend. If it existed at all.

“I’m fairly sure you’re just making things up,” Ren accused the leader. “You can’t possibly tell any of the emotions happening in here right now. I can sense them clearly. Even if the link weakens them, you’d have been able to name one or two.”

Junior shrugged. “What’s there to sense in here? Just some people reading. They might be entertained or immersed or bored or fascinated or-“

Ren pointed to the third boy. “Minhyun has been sexting Aron for the last hour. They went through three distinct scenarios. This lanky bastard has been getting hornier ever minute.”

Not looking up, Minhyun raised one hand. “Guilty.”

Dejected, the leader sank his head to the table surface. “Fine. We’re stopping. I think I can use my time more productively. Why did I let myself get dragged into this?”

“Excuse you?” Ren said louder than the library rules allowed. “ _You_ were the one who dragged _us_ into this.”

The empath rose from his seat to assault the boy. Tickling him until he fell to the floor, Ren thought whether to let a Conmote do the dirty work of punishing the leader. Only when Junior’s emotions became very similar to what Minhyun was experiencing, did Ren realized that the precog had known exactly what reaction he was going to get with his lies.

Clearly, he needed to be punished a lot harder.


	39. Boys like Gods (1)

Gradually, they made progress. Just not the one Aron would have liked to see.

Nothing he did could lift the melancholy that had befallen Minhyun. The dream-walker had returned to the center against the order of Lady Luck – the shining woman on the throne of white. All he had found was the same golden orb, now made impenetrable.

Progress came from a different angle. It didn’t feel like much but they were closing in on the Shadow at last. The villain’s mode of operation left him vulnerable to certain attacks. Several buildings were traceable to him. They were built in poor countries all over the world, where laws allowed to construct buildings without officially registering them. Most were unfinished – strategically so, to use legal loopholes that spared the Shadow those official records from which he so shied away.

One by one Junior's organization tore the enemy's assets from his ominous grip.

The agents of the void where still a problem since the boys of Nuest weren’t able to be everywhere at once to engage them. They had to rely on the ground forces of the organization and additional, recently bought militia made up of semi-legal mercenaries.

The agents themselves were still mysterious. Somewhere between brainwashed cultists and guerrilla terrorists, they followed orders without knowing the big picture.

No more telltale radio signals had been found. Perhaps there were no more artefacts, perhaps the Shadow had found a way to mask them.

Aron couldn’t do much. Which was a strange thing to think for someone with godlike powers, he had to admit. But he was simply not able to fly around the world to look at half-finished office spaces in hopes that the Shadow was hiding in one of his more obvious locations. And from a few country’s distance, Aron might as well not have any powers at all.

He put his time to good use, however.

Their room was certainly the most expensive in the whole complex, because so many things in it were made from gold, silver, white marble, black obsidian, mother of pearl and mahogany. Aron didn’t know what else to turn them into. He had done it originally to impress his boyfriend, but now it was just a hobby. He collected something – twigs, dishes, pens – and turned them into something pricier.

In a way, he was making art. He even had some bigger pieces. Those he kept in Minhyun’s old room. The boy only ever stayed at Aron’s so they had declared it storage space.

In the meantime, Aron’s list grew longer. The more he learned about the corruptions the Shadow used to keep himself out of all records, the more names Aron had to add to the list of people he needed to ‘visit’. It got to the point where even a global murder spree didn’t seem like the right thing to do anymore. At least, not very actionable.

Junior had called them systemic problems. Aron hoped plasma orbs and lightning could combat those somehow.

Right at this time, he was preparing for his beloved to return from some lengthy experiments with Ren and the leader in the library. They had texted throughout and Aron could barely take the anticipation.

The overpowered boy took a huge gold bowl that had been plastic once, and threw junk in it. An unused handkerchief, two empty bottles, a pair of socks with holes and a TV remote that only worked for one out of ten button presses. He transfigured at all into vanilla ice cream, just at the right temperature to melt perfectly in the mouth, staying at a creamy texture without causing brain freeze. He had worked hard to find the ideal ice cream to imitate.

He raised chunks off the heap with telekinesis, touching each one with the tip of his finger and thus transfiguring them into every flavor he could think off. Except strawberry. What was so hard about strawberry? One of these days he would figure it out.

Next was the bed which he turned bigger. The regular sheets became satin. He stood up and touched the low ceiling, tearing a thin layer of concrete out of it to transform into a roof for the canopy bed.

Minhyun had told him not to go overboard with the use of his abilities, but once he got started Aron couldn’t help himself against the flood of great ideas with which his mind came up. He would stop at nothing to distract the dream walker from his misery.

 

***

 

The next day was a field trip for Aron. He despised getting up early. Considering Minhyun kept him awake all night that was understandable. Not that Junior was willing to move the time tables because of anyone’s nocturnal escapades. All the operatives had to be ready in the morning as well and Aron didn’t want to be a total inconvenience.

Regardless, he reserved the right to be grumpy about it.

He had to put on something practical, vaguely military looking. No one actually told him what to wear, but it had been suggested that sweater paws and snapbacks weren’t appropriate for a battlefield. In hindsight that faux pas should have been obvious and he hoped to live it down one day.

Baekho was eager to join him and Aron trusted the muscular boy’s work ethic to rub off on him eventually. Junior was busy with paperwork. Minhyun didn’t go on trips – Aron had insisted the boy be cut some slack. Ren wasn’t feeling like working and Junior gave in without protest. That so called ‘leader’ was Ren’s b*tch as far as Aron was concerned.

Three helicopters full of operatives plus two superpowered boys left the base at sunrise.

Their destination was only a prefecture away. This proximity was the reason why it seemed sensible to let Aron come along. While the base remained at high alert during his absence, he would be able to fly back in case it was all a distraction by the Shadow to mount a new attack.

And the possibility was certainly worth considering.

At their destination they had recently detected a signal via orbital satellite. It looked suspiciously like an attempt to mask the radio impulses that gave away the locations of eldritch devices.

It being so close meant the Shadow either had a base near their head quarter incidentally – which was bad – or knew exactly where they were – which was even worse. Or they were getting bated.

Protocol demanded that the area had to be searched by drones, out of fear of triggering a self-destruct mechanism like back at the subaquatic Kaiju cage. All they had found was a mostly finished, but otherwise abandoned three level building on the slope of a mountain, far from the next settlement. Official records about it were hard to come by.

In short, the signature of the Shadow was clearly all over the installation.

 

***

 

Touchdown happened at a safe distance on the flattest ground the mountainy area had to offer.

Aron stretched his back the second he could to leave the aircraft. Why couldn’t he have gotten flying powers? What use was telekinesis if he had to travel like a peasant? Yes, a peasant with a helicopter fleet, but still. Damn inconvenient.

The lead operative and chief of this mission, Miss Wang, flipped through her clipboard’s content. “Aron, you go with group Alpha. Baekho stays behind with group Bravo until we secured the area. Group Sierra, heat signature visors out.”

Pulling the visors from their storage boxes, the three operatives on surveillance duty made their way to a convenient spotting location. They would look for any signs of human activity or running machinery in the building from afar.

Miss Wang sent the drones for one last round and turned to the two youngest members of the team. Baekho was repeatedly summoning and dismissing Twi orbs. Perhaps a nervous tic.

“Alright boys, it’s probably nothing but never let your guard down for a second. Since most of the Shadow’s important structures so far were buried, we assume if the building contains anything of interest, it’s underground.”

“Should I pull it out?” Aron asked.

“What, you mean the whole building?” Miss Wang said, the surprise in her voice turning to suspicion halfway through the question. “I’d be afraid of triggering anything, but you should dig holes all around the compound if we don’t find an entrance to some basement inside.”

"I will leave no stone unturned."

“Show-off,” Baekho huffed at the American with a smile, still repeatedly creating Twi orbs. “Ever heard of subtlety?”

Aron rolled his eyes. “Oh, because going around telling people to call you the white tiger is such an act of humbleness.”

The chief ignored their amicable squabbling and went over her checklist. “Aron is, as always, our heavy hitter. If anything unusual happens you prioritize-“

“I prioritize saving our agents over dealing damage. I know,” Aron interrupted. “I don’t need to be reminded every mission. I don’t understand why everybody thinks I’m some sociopath who will gleefully abandon humans to go wreak havoc.”

Wang smirked. “Maybe the checklist is due for an update. Still, I have to tell you this for now. Since you can’t be killed by bullets, grenades and the like, always walk in front of the group. But don’t forget to check regularly if the situation behind you has changed. If you have to disable electricity in the surrounding, remember that I won’t be able to reach you over the radio until you lift the blockade.”

This had once upon a time – on his very first training mission – led to an awkward situation where it had looked like he was ignoring all orders on purpose.

She continued. “The building is considered acceptable casualty. In case you need to tear it down to get rid of a threat, don’t hesitate. There are no civilians in the area so that’s one concern less.”

There was a lot more. Put out fires before pressing on. Don’t torture people you capture. Listen to your superiors. Yadda yadda yadda. The list had obviously been written by a committee of organization members who had seen the results of Aron’s scientific ability testing and for some reason skipped over the part where he was mentioned to be older than five.

He couldn’t hold it against the woman. When he had met Miss Wang she had been squealing with joy. For half her life she had been a security expert with occasional dabbles into mercenary work. Commanding a team of superheroes was something of a childhood dream of hers.

A somewhat snarky but otherwise obedient man, who wasn’t a teenager anymore by a small margin only, was not exactly what came to mind at the term superhero, but she treated him with some semblance of respect that wasn’t based on fearing his wrath. Aron felt nothing but respect in return.

Really, he was just glad they didn’t treat him like a weapon with legs.


	40. Boys like Gods (2)

While Baekho got his own checklist lecture, Aron and the five men of team Alpha marched towards the desolate building.

Little vegetation broke apart the gray-brown landscape of rough rocks. The lonely concrete slab of a building – without glass in the windows or even a coat of paint – was a bit spooky, despite the daylight. Only the wind and the steps of their heavy duty boots were audible around them.

Team Sierra had spread out around the zone and surveyed the area, reporting no discernable activity. Commander Wang gave them greenlight.

Marching forth, the five men and one boy passed through the remnants of the construction site. Empty cement bags; a not fully dismantled scaffolding; even an ancient, rusty digger.

As soon as team Alpha was close enough to see the main entrance – no door had been installed – they gave their position to commander Wang and approached running.

Aron rushed into the lobby. Sunlight was falling in from behind him and through the plastic covered window-holes in the bare walls. There were clear signs of habitation – mostly energy bar wrappers and plastic cups.

“Team Alpha, secure the area,” the powerful boy barked as he marched farther in. “I’ll move in first. If nobody is on the ground floor I’m taking the place apart wall by wall. Let’s see if we can find an entrance to below. We can…”

There was a strange hissing sound coming from everywhere at once. Aron’s eyes darted around the space. There were tiny holes in the floor, the ceiling and multiple concrete pillars. Those were causing the noise. What could-

Aron felt _very_ tired _very_ suddenly. Behind him, an operative dropped to the ground. Then another.

What could he do? Close the holes! No, he had to touch all the relevant places. What else? Construct a barrier around himself! No, he would leave the other men on the team out to encounter who knows what. And if the gas was lethal no one could get to him to reanimate him.

The boy sank to one knee, unable to keep his eyes open.

What else? Why were his thoughts so slow? He could…he could…explode the whole damn thing!

With the last shred of consciousness he told the three levels of steel and concrete to move in every direction at once.

The snapping of rock and metal echoed from the surrounding mountains. The earth trembled as the four exterior walls hit the ground individually and the ceilings rained down in man-sized chunks.

Aron didn’t see any of it, already slipping away. It was too late for him.

He thought of Minhyun.

Something creaked.

Prying his eyes open one last time, his vision blurry and fading, he saw men in gasmasks approach. That was one thing to add to the checklist.

 

***

 

_Begin Flashback:_

_Four days after the attack on the time loop bunker._

_Korean main base, 11am._

 

“Okay, this is scary,” Aron said. “It’s that simple to defeat my powers?”

Junior’s face scrunched up. “That’s just it. The principle is simple, but it should be impossible with current technology.”

The two boys had spent several hours since the attack trying to figure out how Aron’s powers had been deactivated by an unknown force field. And now, the better part of this day had been spent trying to find a way to corroborate the precog’s random spark of information. Vacuum bells were oddly hard to come by on short notice.

Accompanied by four scientist they had run a few experiments. The personnel didn’t look science-y, Aron found – less white coats, more fluffy sweaters. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part.

He looked upon the apple that might have weighed a million tons for all he could tell. It was under a thick glass bell that contained no air whatsoever. As the bell had been evacuated his ability had been less and less responsive towards the piece of fruit until he couldn’t move it at all. Even generating plasma or electricity inside the bell wasn’t happening for him.

“How did you figure this out?”

Junior shrugged. “You know how it’s weird that you have so many separate abilities? My random information sense serendipitously told me it’s not as it seems. Think about it this way. You generate plasma, but that’s just superheated air, so we can lump it in with your control over temperature. But that’s just control over molecular or atomic movement. And so, of course, is telekinesis.”

“I see where this is going,” Aron said. “All my abilities that create energy from nothing – which shouldn’t be physically possible anyway – are atom-telekinesis. What about shooting lightning or lasers?”

“Lightning is made of electrons which are-“ Junior said, leaving the sentence hanging as a patronizing question.

“Inside atoms, right. And light is emitted by those, too. But… ” Aron gestured at the mockingly motionless apple with an inquisitive expression.

One of the scientists, whose name the boy couldn’t remember, raised a hand. The middle aged guy with huge glasses and unkempt scruff was the least outwardly excited of the researchers, who had gotten to study Aron’s powers.

“You’re ability is entirely atom based and needs a medium to travel through. Unless you’re underwater, the medium is going to be air. Within a vacuum it doesn’t work. I suspect if we put a bell containing air inside the evacuated one you still wouldn’t be able to affect anything inside of it.”

“Woah!” Aron shot up, having an epiphany. “And my transfiguration affects atoms, too, telling the protons and molecular bonds to be arranged differently. The material itself is the medium. It’s all transfiguration. Everything I do.”

“And that’s how I suspect the force field worked,” Junior said. “It’s actually two layers of field with a millimeter of vacuum in between. I can’t imagine how they knew this would happen. There is no technology that could do that.”

It also became clear that he could have joined them inside the bunker without losing his powers, because the shield only blocked his powers – it didn’t deactivate them. He felt a bit silly about his fear from back then and was glad Junior left this little detail unmentioned.

Aron sighed with dramatic exaggeration. “Time for lunch. I’ll have an orange, or a banana. Just no more apples. We’ve learned a lot today.”

“Yes,” Junior said with a nod. “For example, if you misbehave we only have to shoot you into space.”

_End Flashback._

 

***

 

Aron awoke with several complaints.

The ground was too hard. The lights where too bright. The air was stale. It was difficult to say what irritated him most after having gotten used to his luxurious bed back at the head quarter.

Also, he was completely naked.

Wait? Where was he?

The nude boy shot up. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the harsh light. His surroundings were a special kind of terrifying.

A windowless, clinically white room – square with a high ceiling. Big and empty except for a few technical gadgets like the cameras looking straight at him.

In the center, suspended between floor and ceiling by no discernable mechanism, hovered a shimmering cage. The force fields that were impenetrable to his powers formed a cube of two meters edge length.

And he was inside.

The blueish surface on which he lay was a handbreadth above the PVC floor and the one over his head mirrored it close to the overhead lights. Whatever held his prison up was either invisible or in another room.

Just to make sure he wasn’t missing the obvious, Aron slammed everything he got into the field. Pure kinetic force, plasma, intense heat, electricity, every possible kind of radiation. All power he could muster was reflected along the fields around him and fizzled out unspectacularly.

Nothing outside the cage responded to his telekinesis. He was perfectly trapped.

“Hello Aron,” said the Shadow’s voice from several sources. Every corner of the room had a tiny speaker. So sound could get inside the cage! That wasn’t useful right now, but something to remember.

“I hope you are not feeling any after effects,” the villain continued in English. “It was unavoidable. You understand, surely. I also apologize for your lack of attire, but I didn’t think the risk was worth the increase in modesty.”

Reluctantly, Aron spoke up. “You can hear me out there?”

“No. Sound cannot leave the confine, only enter it by causing specific vibrations in the field. My own design, new and improved. But I am a capable lip reader. If you want to be understood, just look at any of the cameras.”

“Where am I?”

“Kowloon City of Hong Kong. Yau Tsim Mong District.”

It was that simple to make him talk? Was the archenemy going to fall for the trap of laying out his evil plan to the imprisoned hero?

“You just tell me that?” he tried.

“Why not? What could you possibly do with the information? Knowing you are surrounded by living spaces can only deter you from dramatic actions if you are capable of tricks of which I’m not aware.”

“Why am I here? Will you take me apart to see what makes me tic?” If the Shadow wanted him dead above all else, the gas wouldn’t have been non-lethal. But that didn’t mean the guy wasn’t planning to dispose of him later.

“No need. You can stay in one piece. I have no hope of finding the source of your ability inside your brain.”

“Then you already know more than we do.”

“Likely.”

Some things fell into place. But Aron had difficulties putting the vague ideas together. “Wait, do you have a power? Is that why we can’t ever find you? What is it?”

“I have… _options_.”

“The devices,” Aron whispered. “Those ugly things that can’t possibly be of human origin.”

“I have been instructed in their use. Or rather, I have been warned _against_ their use. But with diligent efforts it was possible to turn them from mysteries into tools. Understand, dear Aron, that I don’t intend to kill you or murder everybody I don’t like or anything of the sort. I have no grudge against you. Or your lover, Minhyun”

He chose to ignore the implicit threat. “But you’re trying to use those devices for your gain.”

“Of course. I found one and have been searching for the rest ever since. I do believe my collection _was_ complete. Once you boys found out how to detect them, I had to abandon quite a few, but most are inconsequential to me anyway.”

“What are they? What do they have to do with our powers? What do you _want from me_?”

Aron had never felt so agitated. He wasn’t in immediate danger and by all means he should have used the opportunity to calmly gather information, deliberately weighing how much he could give away for gaining intelligence on the Shadow. But he was just so frustrated.

The unseen man paused for a moment, making the boy fear the conversation was over. “What I want, Aron, is to make things go my way. What I want _from you_ is, ideally, cooperation. How loyal are you to Junior? What does he make you do? Hunt me? Is that a good use of your time? Why not work with me? There are people whose absence would make the world a brighter place. The superrich, who start wars to make a few meaningless billions more. The warlords who follow them and raise armies of children. The CEOs who profit off the misery inflicted.”

“Wow,” Aron said, drawn out and with an eye roll. “You know exactly what I want to hear. Your spies have informed you well. Did you have the cleaning lady read my little list? Guess I should have put it under my pillow or something.”

“I must apologies for underestimating your intelligence.”

“What would you _really_ have me do?”

‘Come on’, Aron thought, ‘tell me your grand master plan so I can go back home with something useful once I’m out of here.’

“I suppose I can be honest,” the Shadow said, slowly. “Perhaps I can still convince you to change loyalties. I wouldn’t make you harm anyone. Indeed, doing harm may come to an end if I am successful. Luck has dropped all I need into my lap.”

Aron grumbled. “Luck is a b*tch. I’ll kick her off her throne next time I see her.”

“ _What_?”

There was genuine alarm in the Shadow’s voice. That had not been scripted. It had sounded overeager, like a slip of the tongue. Was it possible?

“Lady Luck?” Aron tried. “A glowing woman on a throne of white. On top of some crystals or ice or whatever.”

“ _How do you know her_!?”


	41. Boys like Gods (3)

Aron recounted the meeting with Lady Luck, leaving out absolutely _everything_.

He didn’t mention who was with him, why they went there in the first place, how they had gotten in or what the woman had said. He only mentioned things the Shadow had to be aware of already, like the dreamscape and nested links. Not once was he interrupted.

“May I ask,” the Shadow began after Aron was finished, “what Luck has told you?”

“No.”

“I understand. But I am under the impression that you don’t know much. There are things of importance so great you would have mentioned them, even as you tried to obscure every possible detail. I’m not sure I should rectify this. Say, do you have a way of getting back into contact with Luck?”

“N- Y- no?”

“A reluctant answer. We won’t get far if we start lying to each other, Aron.”

“She locked us out for good.”

The Shadow sighed. “In turn I will be honest as well. My endgame includes the use of a device that allows – how should I say – to make suggestions more persuasive.”

“Mind control!” The boy leaned forward to glare at the camera.

“If you need to call it that.” The kidnapper’s calm voice didn’t give his emotions away. “You have my promise that I won’t use it against you or Minhyun, as long as you do _not_ interfere with my work.”

“What about the others?”

The Shadow huffed. “You can’t expect me to let Junior run around unhindered. I won’t kill him, of course, if that can be avoided at all. He is too good an asset to waste. Ren and Baekho are both…very dangerous, but I suppose that depends on how they’re handled.”

“How does your mind control scheme work? And what do you even hope to gain? Just to make yourself king of planet earth?”

Aron had figured something out. He kept the Shadow talking and if he got any more information that was all the better. But really, what he thought about was escape routes. The cage blocked everything from leaving, including radiation and signals. If the device that constructed and suspended his prison was somewhere else, sending the energy to his location, then those signals had to find their way to the outside of the cage.

If he could cut the energy transfer off, he would, hopefully, interrupt the circuit. It was, he surmised, like an electric fence, except without the physical fence through which to run a current. Turn off the generator or cut a cable and the path is clear.

“Do you know,” the Shadow said, “why Lady Luck is interacting with us – with this world? I suppose you don’t. Please know that there is a battle coming. I can’t say what form it will take, but you would do well to focus less on hunting me and instead prepare for the coming events. You will need my help. Tell that to Junior if you ever see him again. Not that I expect you to.”

“So you’ll let me rot in here.”

“I’m sorry about the continued inconvenience. Now that I have you, I can’t let you go. I’m hoping, actually, that you will be joined by your friends fairly soon. Not at the same location obviously. But if I can’t convince you – or you can’t credibly convince me that I have convinced you – then no, I won’t let you out. At least not until the battle is over. A shame, you’d be so helpful, whatever the scenario.”

What had Aron learned so far? The Shadow knew about Lady Luck and perhaps her purpose. He knew about the origin of their powers and had access to several more eldritch devices one of which he could use for some sort of mind control. Perhaps he intended to use the device on Aron in the near future. And he believed in an approaching battle he barely understood himself.

Was any of that even useful beyond raising the level of threat? Again it seemed the Shadow had only given him information he couldn’t turn into an advantage.

The nude boy decided to take the initiative. “Did you really tell the truth about where I am?”

“Yes.”

“Is this one of your pseudo ruins? A building that was never intended to be finished?”

“Also yes.”

“A base of operations, perhaps? You set this prison up for me long in advance. There have to be some agents of the void around to maintain it.”

“Yes, again. What are you trying to figure out, Aron?”

 

***

 

_Begin Flashback:_

_The first week in the organization._

_Korean main base, 4pm._

 

“Come on, just one more test.” Junior said.

Aron groaned for emphasis. “I’ve been transfiguring stuff for you all day. Leave me alone.”

He stole one of the pens from the head researcher’s desk and turned it into licorice. The scientist, whose name the boy still didn’t remember, looked like he wanted to protest. Aron munched his treat before words could reach him.

“He’s going to slap you if you anger him further,” Ren said to Junior from the corner where he leaned. The long haired boy had stopped avoiding the leader since yesterday, because he liked being present for the experiments Aron had to go through.

“You better listen to him,” Aron said. “I can’t take any more tests.”

“There is only a ten percent chance I’ll get slapped,” Junior said. “And this one is different. You can create light, right?”

“Duh.”

“How about a frequency we can’t see. How about microwaves and x-ray. Or radio signals. You could send a message without equipment.”

“Fine. That’s something I’ve never tried before. Just this one test.”

Junior waved the researcher to stand up and grabbed Ren by the shirt. “Alright, Aron. We’ll be behind this really, really thick wall of lead. Fifteen percent chance you’ll kill every microbe in this lab. Try _not_ to make a gamma ray burst to rival the deep cosmos. This equipment is hard to decontaminate.”

_End Flashback._

 

***

 

“Fine, I’ll ask freely,” Aron said to the camera, making sure his lips were easy to read. “Signals can’t come into the cage, but they can move around in the room outside of it, right? I mean things like radio broadcasts or Wi-Fi. It’s quite obvious since the cameras have to send the footage somewhere.”

“If you think about sending a message to your friends, you will be disappointed. There is no way for you to get a signal out. I have sensors that would have detected it by now if you had somehow managed. And as far as I recall you never figured out how to fine tune your radio waves to the point of sending messages.”

Aron allowed himself to chuckle, even though it was undignified. Here began the exciting part. “I’ll just have to step out of the cage then.”

“I wonder how you would do that,” the Shadow said with a hint of amusement.

“Transfiguration isn’t blocked by the force field,” the boy said with triumph.

“I know. That's why the cube is hovering. Every test the organization made you run through shows you need to touch a substance before-“

Aron laughed openly. “ _You're wrong_.”

He waited for the words to impact before he continued. “I lied to everyone. All the scientists. Even Junior. Totally by accident. Never saw a reason to give away my last secret once i had figured it out. Maybe Junior knew it anyway.”

“What-“

“You’ve already apologized for underestimating my intelligence earlier. But I don’t think you are truly sorry. Well, you will be.”

“What are you- Aron, my boy, we can talk-“

The nude prisoner rose to a stand. “I’m not your boy. I’m nobody’s boy.”

“What do you-“

“ _Don’t mess with me_.”


	42. Boys like Gods (4)

Purely for effect, Aron raised his arms.

Then he revealed his well-kept secret.

He hadn’t even hidden it on purpose. It had just been kind of a habit to summon things with telekinesis before he transfigured them. After the official experiments, he had run his own tests. Creating a vacuum was trivially done by expanding a solid body without breaking it.

In truth, he didn’t need to touch an object to apply transfiguration. He just had to be _close enough_. And the small distance between him and the floor was no hindrance. So was the distance to the ceiling. He had never been truly trapped.

The concrete plates above and below the cage nearly liquefied as the boy commanded them to take on a new quality on an atomic level.

Thick, moldable lead sheets enveloped his prison from top to bottom like tendrils growing along an invisible sphere. The second he was fully cut off from the outside, his cage disappeared. A snapping thunder crack occurred as the vacuum was instantly filled.

Aron dropped to the ground. He was illuminated by light of his own making.

One more step and he was out of reach of the cage in case it reappeared the second he opened his lead cocoon. He told all electric lines in the building to quit their job. If he stepped outside the metal sphere, stuck between floor and ceiling, he would find darkness and dysfunctional cameras.

The air was chilly. Rubbing his hands happened out of human habit even though he remembered right away he could adjust the temperature of the air on his skin to his wishes.

Aron opened the lead encasing and entered the white room he had seen around his cage.

It was full of toxic gas.

The Shadow had shown foresight again and made sure that even escaping from the confine wasn’t going to safe Aron. The boy cursed. He had already breathed in the substance before realizing what was going on.

Now he could feel his muscles tense up, then relax entirely. He sank to the ground, almost landing with his face on the concrete.

Not again. This time he reacted faster.

Aron surrounded himself with temperatures worthy of hell. Plasma burned a truck-sized, round hole into the wall next to him and all walls behind that one. The outside became visible – blue sky – three rooms away.

The intense heat burst also served the purpose of tearing the atoms of the toxic gas apart, burning it as efficiently as only the center of the sun could have done. The walls glowed.

Outside air streamed in to fill the vacuum.

He didn’t lose consciousness. But he was nearly paralyzed. Why-oh-why couldn’t he have gotten telekinesis that applied to himself? How was he supposed to move if his limbs weren’t under his control?

Aron moved the floor. A ripple served as headrest, letting him look ahead. He expanded on the concept until he was sitting – or leaning – in a crude chair made from PVC that he turned into something more akin to wood. There was no time to get the details right.

The entire level’s floor bent and twisted until it formed a hill that Aron in his ugly chair slid down, having transfigured the surface perfectly smooth. The hill moved with him, always letting him slide further as he laid there, muscles lax.

It was a ridiculous way to travel, like a mockery of a wheelchair. But if the agents in the building found him, they might have a way to finish the job of putting him to sleep. Or worse.

Within a minute of careful maneuvers he made it to the hole to the outside and looked down. Fifty floors, roughly. There was a plaza below and other skyscrapers around it. The one he was in was standing on its own at the rim of the square.

Should he build himself a slide? Well, stairs wouldn’t work in his condition. Unless he found the actual staircase so he could turn _that_ into a slide. Greatly preferable, since it didn’t require him to construct it on the outside of the skyscraper for all the world to see.

He made his way back into the prison room by the same method of ‘floor sliding’.

Maybe there was a way to figure out where the staircase was. Aron poked the building with his powers, sensing where and how his kinetic impulses traveled, got reflected and vanished. He wanted to take the walls apart, but had to be careful not to collapse the whole thing.

Telekinesis radar was too unrefined to tell him anything more than the vague size of adjacent rooms – usually. This time he got a surprising piece of additional information. There was one anomaly – a single, small object he could not affect, somewhere five levels down. It remained unresponsive to his attempts to move it. Why would something so small have a force field?

…Because it was the generator!

Then he smelled fire. He must have blown a few fuses in the desolate hack job of a construction when he turned off the electricity. Or the Shadow had activated a self-destruct mechanism.

Regardless of current danger, Aron tore a small slab of concrete from the wall and transfigured it into cloth. Not too elegant, but it would do. Since he lacked the time and finesse to turn it into a proper set of clothing, it ended up more like an oversized overall, but it covered what it had to. He could only move with immense effort and if anything the paralysation was getting worse over time.

The boy wanted to get to the ground floor with a detour to the generator. There were five floors between him and his side objective.

Aron selected a convenient rectangle of floor and cut it at three sides, leaving a short one for the embedded steel carriers to hold. With a loud thump, the improvised ramp connected his level with the one below.

As soon as he slid down, he saw a group of armed agents. They opened fire, which was as futile a thing as they could have tried. Aron didn’t bother to count them, he just exploded the men into a fine mist sprayed across the unfurnished environment. No time for niceties.

The smell of burning cables was getting stronger.

And he was getting sleepy. Whatever the toxic substance had been, it was something different than the one from the mission, because he didn’t remember getting paralyzed the first time. Should he turn debris into a caffeine bar or something? There was no telling if that would counteract the toxin at all. And even so it would likely not take effect before he succumbed. Why hadn’t he learned how to transfigure adrenaline?

Another ramp down, another bunch of agents, easily exploded. By now he was able to see a faint layer of smoke, rising from lower levels. For once the armed agents were a real threat. If he wasn't awake to redirect the bullets they would penetrate him like any non-superpowered person. So much to take care of.

Three to go. Aron built the next ramp. This one broke. Metal rods complained loudly and ripped the surrounding floor apart as they were torn downward.

He turned himself around and tried again at a different spot. Sliding down to the level below, a subconscious idea surfaced. He attempted to envelope the entire skyscraper with his mind – more material than he had ever accessed before.

Every human in the building exploded. One less worry.

To make sure the construction would stay up until he had made his way down Aron cooled the cables to freezing temperature. Ice formed along the lines in the ceiling and chilly air sank down on him. His breath came out as little clouds before the cool air dissipated. The cold cleared his head a tiny bit, but he was still getting drowsier. At least this permafreeze should put out all fires.

Detonations downstairs, causing vibrations throughout the tower. So it _was_ a self-destruct mechanism. That bastard.

Muscle spasms threw Aron back and forth for a moment, uncontrollably flinging him out of his chair and onto the ground. His baggy overall did little to cushion the impact.

There was no time. He felt his consciousness slip. And he still couldn’t move more than a finger.

It would probably hurt, but constructing another chair and sliding down more ramps wasn’t doing the trick. Especially now that the smoke got thicker and his eyes were getting teary. _He had to fall_.

Aron transfigured as much of the ground below him as he thought necessary into the fluffiest cashmere he could manage. In the second of falling, he tore walls out of the floor below and commanded them to go under him and his supersized pillow. Just as he impacted, he turned the debris into a small avalanche of colorful balloons to act as airbags for the cashmere mattress.

He sank deep into the pile and barely felt an impact, well cushioned by squeaking balloons. Only a few popped. Unfortunately he had rotated while falling and was now face down. It was already hard to breathe with the smoke in his lungs and the toxin acting on his respiratory muscles.

Only one level under him, the eldritch device was awaiting its destruction by his hand and he would not fall asleep before the deed was done. The boy turned the floor below him and his pillow pile to marshmallows – truckloads of them – and fell.

The rain of sugar-fluff braced his fall and he managed to land face up, almost in a sitting position.

There was absolutely nothing on the next level. Not even partitions or windows. Only steel carriers held the ceiling. The cables running along the inside of the exterior wall were on fire, serving as the sole light source.

The device was the only thing in the entire, massive, empty room. Disturbingly ugly, with tendons and ligaments, looking half organic, half mechanical, the device was wrapped in its blueish field.

It was obviously a trap and obviously too late to react.

Out of its many protrusions, the horrific thing shot the boy with forcefield projectiles, landing multiple hits.


	43. Boys like Gods (5)

The device’s projectiles were marble sized force field orbs, traveling through the air until they met something solid.

Aron was hit by dozens of them. As soon as they made contact with his skin they expanded into rings and spheres that stuck to his body. He was immobilized in space, half sitting, pressed to the marshmallow covered floor.

His wide eyes were fixed on the eldritch apparatus upon its mundane pedestal. The boy tried to calm himself. He was still winning. Only the length of half the building separated him from the object.

Something swooshed.

A hissing sound he knew too well. There were tiny holes in the floor and ceiling. Many of the pipes had been broken but that didn’t stop the gas from flowing into the room. More toxin. And who could say if this one was lethal? How many layers of successive traps had the Shadow planned? If any of his devices gave him powers like Junior’s it might actually be impossible to escape alive.

Not that Aron was about to give up.

Breaking the exterior walls was too risky as it might have brought down the whole building, which was probably wonky enough after his rampage. So he tore pieces out of the floor and dropped them down until he was on the only sizeable platform left. That should give him a little more air.

He was about to do the same with levels below to finally break the gas pipes comfortably far down and redirect them outside. The floor under the pedestal crumbled. The alien device fell.

And Aron _didn’t_ fall with it!

With a gross crunching sound, the ugly thing impacted below from where smoke and dust were rising, limiting his vision.

He transfigured the cashmere covered marshmallow pile under him to glass surrounding his body as a dome to secure non-toxic air flow for as long as there was oxygen in the half sphere. He had bought himself a few minutes to think.

If the device could be moved and he was still stuck in the same spot that meant…the force fields were fixed to the specific objects and _not_ in relation to the device. And it also meant his motion wasn’t as limited as he thought. At least in one direction. If he couldn’t get himself there, he had to bring it to him.

More detonations far below. The sound of glass breaking. Vibrations traveling through the construction.

Aron crumbled the ground under himself and fell onto the same level as the device. There were enough marshmallows left to save his spine.

Of course his glass dome shattered but he transformed it whole the moment he impacted, before any precious air could escape. There was fire everywhere. As an afterthought he turned the glass to diamond to keep it from fracturing in the heat. Now where was it? He couldn’t see it anymore – this floor had interior walls. The smoke was so thick that nothing outside his dome was even visible. Much of the surrounding was ablaze with some strange, oily fuel that gave off black smoke.

There was a chance that freezing the area to put the fires out was going to trigger more detonations so he didn’t attempt it.

How could he get to the device? Turn the floor into a slide leading to the middle of the level below and just hope the thing was going to drop into his hands? But that relied on luck. He knew exactly where it was. How could he use that to his advantage? And even after that he still had to escape with a paralyzed body.

Aron had an idea. It was a mad one. And possibly one with catastrophic consequences. Quite possibly, really.

Despair won over caution.

He could only hope the plaza had been evacuated. There was a good chance he’d hit someone. Or something. No avoiding that.

 

***

 

It happened a lot quicker than it felt. And it felt really quick.

Step one: Aron disintegrated the floor on which the device laid and five below that, making it fall to where he needed it to be.

Step two: Aron disintegrated the level he was on and everything between him and the device’s level. For all of a second he was free falling through a cloud of dust inside the crumbling structure, holding his breath.

Step three: Aron _moved the building_ around him.

The entire skyscraper snapped at the base and jumped to one side. Two hundred thousand tons of steel and concrete were slammed onto the plaza by the force of a boy’s mind.

While the skyscraper moved, Aron fell, making his way vertically – but seemingly diagonally – towards the device. An arm’s length before he touched it, he was in reach. As expected, this force field didn’t block transfiguration either. The horrid eldritch thing turned to dust and everything below it did too.

He was still falling. There had to be about thirty or forty floors left.

Now for the tricky part.

Aron moved the tower again. This time leaning it forward so it would fall onto the plaza and hopefully avoid bringing down any other skyscrapers with it. The back wall approached him as he kept falling. Everything between him and the outside disintegrated during free fall and the boy found himself passing the hole to the exterior.

The outside was sunny but a bit dimmed by all the rising smoke from the multiple fires that licked up the unfinished front.

The collapse was surprisingly loud. The inner structure fought against its demise with every piece of steel baked into it.

As the building became more and more horizontal, Aron hit the concrete on the outside wall and transformed it into a slide as he went along, gliding down the skyscraper. His fall turned into a ride, then got slower and as the building almost laid flat he halted himself by turning the wall into something grittier that caught onto his now shredded overall.

There was a lot of smoke and dust and debris. Even more rose as the tower smashed into the earth.

Aron broke the part he was on into chucks and made his way down, falling through the remainder of the unfurnished lobby. He came to a rest at the broken base of the burning building. By now he could move a hand or a foot but spasmed whenever he tried.

What was his plan now? Wait until he could move again? What if somebody found him in the meantime? He’d have to hide. Once he was able to move he would have to ask around for a pay phone. Somebody in this city had to speak the kind of English he could actually understand.

His mind was occupied with ideas of transforming his attire into something a backpack tourist could credibly wear and how to turn rocks into Hong Kong Dollars when a link prodded his mind.

“Aron? Are you awake?”

“Minhyun?”

“Yes! Thank goodness. I’m so happy, you have no idea. Do you know what that looked like? Did _you_ do that? On _purpose_? I was already planning your funeral.”

The paralyzed boy laughed. His lungs and chest muscles didn’t really agree with that, but as far as possible in his condition, he laughed. It turned into a teary cough and his vision blurred, but that didn’t stop him from sending.

“How did you find me?”

“Junior,” Minhyun sent. “He watched TV all day to get a glimpse at the news before they happened. When he foresaw the collapse of this building half an hour ago, he recognized that it broke in an impossible way. Not something that’s too hard to obfuscate. It’s not even making international news. Are you okay? We’re almost there.”

“Sure,” Aron sent, now breathing more easily, slowly, with his eyes closed. “But… I can’t move.”

“What do you mean? You’re trapped?”

“No...I’m paralyzed...And I hope you can get to me fast, because…now that all the excitement is gone, I think…I’m falling asleep. Please…Min…hyun…”

Above him, Aron heard the blades of a helicopter.

Then everything went black.

 

***

 

The next day, Aron spent in a hospital where he got the best detox cure the doctors could figure out. Without knowing what the specific gas was he’d be lucky if there was no permanent damage to his nerves. The spasms would continue for a while. Recovery time was pegged somewhere between a week and a month.

Then he was moved home to the main base.

It was extraordinarily weird, sitting in a wheelchair. He was used to having working legs for one thing. But unlike most people he was also used to moving things with telekinesis. Only himself and the things he touched were unmovable to him. And that was the weird part. He had an easier time maneuvering absolutely anything other than his wheelchair. He had never realized how odd that was, because…well, he had been able to just _go_ places.

Minhyun shoved him around with endless patience. The base had ramps for internal transport of large stuff. But the rest wasn’t accessible, exactly. Doorframes were a repeating obstacle.

All the sweet treats in the world couldn’t lift his mood the way Minhyun’s care did. Things went almost back to normal. Now that the feeling was returning to his limbs, the spasms actually hurt. But that was as bad as it got and only temporary.

Aron was glad to be alive.

There were thoughts that kept him going. They were mean thoughts, technically, but he found them comforting. Oh, how very sorry the Shadow would be once they had him.


	44. Healing Time - G

_[Mildly mature content towards the very end of the chapter. Nothing explicit.]_

Junior was busy with a new project he had yet to officially unveil. Naturally, Ren was with him all the time, but today Minhyun had also been asked to help.

Therefore it fell to Baekho to keep the American entertained. By now, the foreign boy didn’t really need the wheelchair anymore but he was – according to Minhyun – terribly afraid of a spasm making him fall flat on his face, so he still used it.

The white tiger thought that was a little paranoid, but admittedly it was a really cute face and he’d hate to see it bruised.

Carrying two cups of not-too-hot chai tea, Baekho made his way into a part of the facility he had rarely been to.

He knocked on the door to the improvised sanatorium – a roomy storage chamber that had been repurposed for Aron’s rehabilitation. Baekho knew that the recovering boy spend a lot of time throwing balls, walking along a railing and treading water in a sizeable indoor pool. A nice environment and perhaps even more comfortable than his own room. Which was why he didn’t hesitate to barge in, expecting none of what he saw.

Baekho almost dropped the chai when he _stepped into a universe_.

Walls and ceiling were a night sky, stars circling before dimly glistening nebulae. Tiny clusters and hand sized galaxies wobbled between red, blue and purple constellations.

In the middle on a hill of treasure – gold bars, coins and gem stones – perched Aron, gazing up at the ‘stars’.

Taking a few steps, Baekho cleared his throat. At last, the American noticed him.

“Tiger boy! Oh, you bring me something to drink. All the better. Can you climb up with your hands full?”

“Sure,” Baekho said and began to ascend the small hill. It was all candy. The gold coins were tin foil wrapped chocolate; the gems were jelly beans; the bars were gingerbread; most complicated stuff was made of marzipan.

One such item was a crown sitting on Aron’s head.

As Baekho dropped down next to the boy he sighed and handed over one cup. He wasn’t planning on staying. There was no way he could resist the call of sugar long enough to keep his hips slim.

“Shouldn’t you be exercising?” he said, with a gesture towards the unused equipment in the dark parts of the room.

“Nah, I can walk just fine,” Aron said and took a sip. “By now it’s a matter of working on the fine motor skills. My fingers are still a bit stiff.”

For a while Baekho watched as the other boy played with his candy, crafting small art pieces.

“You know,” he began again, “Junior said maybe we should all get chipped with a gps tracker. But there’s a good chance the Shadow would find a way to jam the signal so we’d have to do it in secret and…really I don’t know how I feel about the whole idea of getting a chip into my neck.”

Aron hummed noncommittally.

Well, so much for conversation. The American boy had been imprisoned by their arch nemesis, revealed a secret technique, survived multiple death traps and brought down a skyscraper. There was much to talk about, but there was simply nothing to _say_. ‘So, Aron, what’s is like to be paralyzed? Oh, it sucks? Figures.’

Baekho emptied his cup and vaguely motioned towards the faux night sky. “What’s _this_ all about?”

“I tried some new things,” Aron said. “If I hadn’t known about the vacuum transfiguration thing I might not have been able to think of a way out of the cage. So now I experiment with my powers. I’m plucking photons out of the upper atmosphere and recreating them in here. Spent a while outside but now I can do it indoors. This is what you would see if you were in a space station.” He called upon one of the small galaxies circling above the hill. In his hand it rotated slowly. “Then I warped the images of individual objects I found interesting. This one is called the pinwheel galaxy. I can’t make them much bigger without making them blurry. Guess I would actually have to be up there.”

Baekho gave in and treated himself to a jelly bean. “How are things with Minhyun?”

“Fantastic,” Aron said, with an eye roll. “He’s making me eat fruit, because he wants me to get used to real food again. Oh, the things I do for love. How are things with that weird arrangement between Junior, Ren and yourself?”

“You know about that?”

“You’re loud. All of you.”

Baekho felt the heat rising in his cheeks. “You sleep in a different part of the building. We can’t be _that_ loud.”

“Ever thought that someone might want to speak to the leader some evenings? I can’t count how often I turned around because I knew what was going on when I was only standing outside the door.”

“Uh…is that…do we have to stay on topic here?”

Aron shrugged. “I’ve been feeling pretty bored lately. Days with nothing to do but paddle in the kiddy pool. Don’t think I’m completely out of the loop. I know it’s weird to sit on a mountain of candy and look at stars that aren’t there. But what to do? We know exactly as much about the Shadow as we did before.” He scratched his hair under the marzipan crown. “I was kind of mad at myself for destroying the device completely and utterly. But in the moment there was no telling how much damage would have been enough to incapacitate it. Now we’re back to square one.”

“At least you gave him a good beating. He’ll run out of resources eventually. The…uh…the blood splatter count indicated that the building contained a huge amount of agents of the void. Maybe the majority, Junior says. Maybe all of them. Good job.”

The tiger awkwardly reached over and patted Aron’s shoulder for a moment. When that didn’t earn him a comment he let his hand rest on Aron’s back.

“Are you…uh,” Aron said, “coming onto me?”

“ _What_?” Baekho retracted his hand at lightning speed.

“Kay. Never mind.”

Baekho tried to rise up to tower over the other boy, slipped on some squished chocolate money and dropped back into a sitting position. “I…I wasn’t. No way.”

“Not a problem if you were.”

“I wasn’t!”

“Alright. Forget it.”

The ensuing silence wasn’t comfortable of course but anything he could have said would make it even worse. A few times Baekho glanced to the side and each time Aron caught him looking. Well, maybe it was time to leave then. How had the American even come to this conclusion? Unless…

“Would you…” Baekho said quietly, “would you have liked me to?”

There was only the tiniest bit of hesitation. “I’d sure like to know what all the fuzz is about.”

Baekho turned to Aron and looked right at his smiling face. It really _was_ a cute face. But…

“I can’t make you cheat on Minhyun.”

“What I have with Minhyun is completely different,” the American said. “I promise he won’t mind. Actually, he’ll pluck all the details out of my head later.”

“I bet you and Minhyun have done a few odd things, too, with those powers of yours.”

Aron chuckled. “Not really, to be honest. But I did think of an application or two, which seem worth testing.”

“Not on top of all this food, though,” Baekho said. “That’s a bit icky.”

With a booming swoosh the whole pile collapsed, becoming the biggest memory foam mattress in existence. The boys landed on the huge, silk draped rectangle.

How useful. Aron could make his bed where ever he pleased. Baekho wasn’t sure if he preferred this situation or Junior’s ability to warn him well before he hurt the boy. How wild would Aron allow him to go?

Both boy’s clothes exploded off their bodies and fell as a thousand shreds around the bed. The American rolled on top of the surprised Baekho. Skin on skin.

Aron’s face wore a radiant smile. “And no shifting into Twi, tiger boy. You’re mine now.”

Somehow Baekho had assumed he would be in charge. Apparently not. Well, that was yet to be decided.

He shifted under Aron, doubtlessly making the boy drop the distance to the mattress. In Twi the starry night illusion wasn’t there – just boring, gray ceiling. Baekho flew up and popped back out, slamming into Aron’s backside from an arm’s length above. The pinned boy huffed in surprise and turned his head as far as the white tiger’s weight on his back allowed. “So we’re having a role related disagreement, huh? Don’t make me turn this bed into a wrestling pit.”

Baekho chuckled. “We’ll just have to figure it out as we go along. Let’s get started on those ideas you mentioned. And for the record, I’d beat you in any fair fight, pretty boy.”

“Bring it, kitty cat.”

It wouldn’t take too long for Aron to find out what made Junior so loud on those occasions, Baekho was sure of that. They’d have a lot of fun for the rest of the day. If neither would relent, they’d just have to try every possible permutation.

They got started.

Galaxies spun overhead.


	45. Idle in the Maze (1)

Baekho knew something was terribly wrong when he only saw one bed.

They were back in the same chamber where the boys of Nuest had entered the dreamscape a while ago. But now the comfy beds were gone – replaced by a single one that looked a whole lot more clinical, perhaps really taken from a hospital.

Jason activated and checked the medical screens attached to the thing, following the orders of Doctor Feng who was back at her desk, supervising the hard- and software checks.

With a look at Junior, the white tiger hoped to find a source of confidence, but the slender boy appeared as nervous as he only did when the future he foresaw wasn’t so bright. Baekho wondered when the leader was going to explain.

Aron had less patience. “So, commander, what’s all this here?”

With a heavy sign Junior began. “We’ll try something dangerous – not dangerous for you, but for me. If you’d rather not stay, I understand. I just wanted to make sure you don’t feel like I’m going behind your back. You see, it’s important for a team to-“

“What _is_ it?” Aron said with a gesture towards the equipment.

It was clear that Ren and Minhyun already knew. They had been with Junior for the whole day. But if Minhyun hadn’t already told Aron via telepathy then this was something that deserved to be spoken aloud. Baekho pulled at the seam of his shirt, in an attempt not to fidget.

“There were a few moments,” Junior said, “when my ability to gain random useful information out of nowhere went into overdrive. These situations all have one commonality. I was desperate beyond sanity. The most striking case was-“

“No!” Aron interrupted.

“-when I was dying,” Junior finished.

Did he mean… He couldn’t possibly be talking about suicide. How would that help?

“Flatlining,” Minhyun said, to give Junior a break. “We’re inducing an artificial near-death-experience by stopping his heart for a moment.”

Aron was wide eyed. “You’re not killing yourself. I won’t allow that. You’re not.”

“No, I’m not. It’s nothing like that,” Junior said.

Everybody avoided everybody else’s eyes and there were probably enough different emotions in the room to give Ren a headache. Baekho felt it was necessary for him to weigh in with his opinion but what was he going to say? His leader – his friend – was going to ‘flatline’. If it didn’t work he might die and- Wait!

“Don’t you know your chances?” Baekho broke the silence. “Do you know how likely you’ll live or die?”

“Well, doctor Feng has consulted the literature and we’ve concluded the risk is minim-“

“You know what I mean, dammit.” Baekho had enough. He wanted answer. The more straight-forward, the better, so he could stop feeling conflicted.

Junior waved them over to an assembly of sofas and a coffee table, none of which had been in the room the first time around. As the boys settled in, Jason came over to serve tea and biscuits. He even joined them on the couches. It was all a bit surreal. With too much information at once, Baekho’s emotions were hard to put into words.

How did he feel? Kind of angry, really. Mostly about being the last to hear about the plan. Admittedly there was also Aron, but the American was likely talking to his boyfriend over a link that very moment, getting all the juicy details.

“The first time it happened,” Junior said, “was when I realized the world was going to end. I think I might have had a panic attack. Anyway, I suddenly knew there were others with powers and where I could find all of you. I even knew your names and how to best approach each one.”

So far that was mostly a repetition of what they had been told in their first meeting.

Ren loosely hugged the leader as he continued. “And this sort of thing never happens without an external trigger around. I assume my psychological condition was the trigger, but in any case…” He took a sip of tea. “When I was dying in that parking lot, I stopped seeing anything further ahead than a few minutes. That’s how I knew I was a goner. But then it happened again and I knew out of nowhere that Minhyun had a latent ability that could save me. Suddenly, I could see the future again.”

He hummed a bit, evidently not knowing how to explain his thoughts. “The problem with this is, I guess, that I still had a certain chance of dying. But I didn’t see future paths truncated, even if my chance of death was above five percent, which I can’t know if it was. I don’t see a fixed number of timelines, I only see all the options with enough probability. The one’s I wouldn’t see because I wouldn’t be there… well, those I just can’t see at all. So if I was going to die in this,” he gestured towards the bed, “I wouldn’t be able to foresee it as long as I have a chance of making it.”

“I believe in you,” Ren said, quietly. “If that counts for anything.”

“I’ll keep us all linked,” Minhyun said. “That’s a massive advantage over any other medical equipment.”

Baekho stared at the bowl of cookies. No one had taken any. No one could stomach any. He realized that Jason was perfectly still as to not draw any attention to himself. The Chinese boy probably regretted sitting down with them.

“You don’t need our permission,” Baekho said.

Junior met his gaze. “But I’d like to have it.”

For a second Baekho looked over to Aron who nodded slightly. “Fine, but we’ll be here,” Baekho said and took a deep, exagerated breath. “Flatlining, huh? I sincerely hope it’ll be worth it. If all your overdrive finds out is everybody’s favorite color I’ll never let you do anything on your own ever again.”

“Thanks,” Junior said. “If this goes wrong, or if it fails to get any results, Aron becomes the leader.”

No one disagreed. The American hummed, without looking up.

Baekho swallowed past the lump in his throat. “When is it happening?”

“Tomorrow. I have a few things to prepare for the organization, to make sure it won’t run out of funds in the near future.”

Doctor Feng called Jason to her and the boy was on his feet as if the sofa had caught fire. It was strange to have the assistant in their midst. As far as the white tiger knew Jason had been some kind of adjunct to Junior’s endeavors in China and his position had been upgraded to P.A. when they moved headquarters. But he had never heard him say more than hello.

Perhaps Baekho bragged a bit too much about his Mandarin skills, but he was fairly competent. He’d have to talk to the boy sometime.

 

***

 

Once there was nothing more to do but to repeatedly assure each other with unkeepable promises and optimistic truisms, the group dissolved for the day. Baekho got up the slowest and let the others leave without him, then sat back down. Doctor Feng left for a coffee break. What better time?

Baekho waited on the sofa until Jason came over to take away the empty cups. He realized he didn’t remember any of the words he needed for the conversation. And what was Mandarin for flatlining?

He tried anyway. “Hello.”

Jason nodded and smiled a little, but went right back to collecting cups.

“What… um,” Baekho said, “What’s your job here, exactly?”

If the boy was surprised to have one of the Nuest guys talking to him, he didn’t show it. “I was Junior’s spokesperson. Then you all moved to China, so now he can say what he wants without a proxy. I’m his P.A.”

“Aren’t you a little young?”

“I’m older than I look.” Jason winked. “Too old for you.”

“Oh, I wasn’t… uh.”

The Chinese assistant didn’t pick up his tray but he also didn’t sit down. Baekho waved at the free space of the sofa he occupied and Jason plopped himself there without hesitation.

“But I _am_ fairly young,” Jason said. “In the beginning I was only the guy who makes copies and brews the coffee. You know that most people in the organization aren’t told anything about the superpowers, right? It’s all need-to-know. At least it was. Now it’s a lot smaller and tighter and the superpowers thing is more of a focus.”

“How did you get promoted then?” Baekho asked.

“Junior came by for an inspection and saw my past when I filled his glass. I don’t know what triggered it or the details of what he saw, but apparently I was the most trustworthy employee around. Quite an honor. From then on I was giving orders of his behalf, because he knew I wasn’t going to go behind his back.”

“And now were here,” Baekho said. “And you’re back to brewing coffee. Sorry.”

Jason chuckled. “It’s fine. I still get to act on Junior’s behalf. Besides,” he said with another wink, “the demotion didn’t cut my salary.”

The white tiger giggled at the remark. This assistant guy was quite alright. And not to be too proud of himself but he had understood most of the conversation with no difficulty.

There was also a heavier subject to broach.

“What do you think of all this,” Baekho said, motioning towards the bed.

A soft sigh left Jason’s lips. “I can’t blame him for trying. Let’s hope he gets something out of it. I was there when he came up with it. I think he feels guilty for being so useless, even though everyone knows he can’t control his ability.”

Doctor Feng returned and brought a heartrate monitor Jason had to install on her desk.

Baekho didn’t stay long. He didn’t like being in the room where he might lose a friend tomorrow. But of course he wouldn’t tell anyone. He had to be positive – for the group.


	46. Idle in the Maze (2)

_[Some slightly gory violence after the paragraph starting with "Soundlessly".]_

It was time. Baekho wasn’t ready, but it was time anyway.

Junior was already on the bed, getting a variety of sensors fixed to his fingers and torso. While Baekho couldn’t read the output of the heartrate monitor with certainty, it was clear the boy had to be nervous even if he didn’t show it.

The sofas had been moved closer and a few armed operatives were present for generic security reasons but stood at the far side of the room, guarding the only entrance with their backs turned to the scene.

Minhyun helped Aron, who had left his wheelchair behind but still used a crutch, to sit down. Ren wasn’t going to stop pacing no matter how many times he was asked to. Baekho had ants crawling under his skin himself. His fight-flight reflex worked overtime but there was nothing to punch and nowhere to run. Jason’s calming herbal tea did nothing to keep his nerves soothed.

The instant everything was set up, Junior gave the OK without directing a single word at the boys. It was rude, but Baekho understood that the leader couldn’t afford to start a conversation – or a round of goodbyes – as somebody would have ended up crying and begging him to stop. Perhaps everybody.

Baekho stood a couple of steps away from the bed, his hands in tight fists.

Doctor Feng administered the first injection. It was designed to make Junior sleep soundly – as close as he could get to a coma without turning off his consciousness. Since the boy always retained random information with perfect clarity once gathered there was no risk of him forgetting anything in his slumber.

The leader got covered with an aluminium blanked, as if he was already a corpse. An oxygen mask attached to a small tank supplied the anesthetized boy with air.

Then came the weird part. The doctor opened a huge box and called upon an operative to assist her. Freezing fog escaped the container and crept along the floor, chilling the air. Junior’s body was packed with ice bags until he was covered in them. His body temperature sank. His heartrate, too.

There was no beeping sound – all devices were on silent mode. But as the cardiogram’s spikes became flatter, Baekho could almost hear it like a crescendo of the blood rushing through his ears.

He turned around to see what Minhyun was doing.

The dream-walker had to link a sleeping person with waking ones. First he had to find Junior in the scape, then came back – while linked – and connect the others. This required a state of trance, at least in the initial stage, or else Minhyun wouldn’t have access to the scape in time.

Baekho felt the link nudge his mind and accepted the intrusion. Ren was the first to send, assuring Junior that everybody was there and they wouldn’t leave his side. Baekho hadn’t been present for it, but Jason had told him there had been a lot of debate between Ren and the doctor, because the empath wasn’t allowed to hold the patient’s hand during the process. The body heat would interfere with the cooling.

“I’m here,” Junior sent, startling everyone. Apparently, Minhyun had even included the doctor, Jason and the main operative in the link network. The dream-walker’s powers had developed considerably since the early days.

“Am I dying yet?” the leader asked.

“Soon,” Doctor Feng sent. “Erm, I mean, no, of course not. But your temperature will reach critical levels within the minute.”

The plan was to reanimate the boy within thirty seconds of cardiac stand-still. Unless something went wrong.

“This feels weird,” Junior sent. “I know I’m dreaming but I’m not properly lucid. I guess I’ll just keep talking. I really don’t know how to describe this, though. It’s very…dark. And cold. I guess, that was to be expected.”

Baekho’s eyes dashed back and forth between the screens showing Junior’s heart rate and brain activity. The former was down to almost nothing, the latter was unhindered. The white tiger had of course read up on the subject over the course of the night and knew that people with pacemakers had their devices deactivated for battery switching and were technically without heartbeat for a minute or so, experiencing no consequences. Still, it was almost as if his own heart wanted to make up for the slowdown of Junior’s.

“There’s…there’s a light now, I think,” Junior sent. “It’s beautiful.”

Then the spikes were gone. The boy’s blood wasn’t being pumped anymore. Zero beats per minute.

Flatline.

Jason activated a timer for thirty seconds. If nothing else happened, this was how long the patient would be left technically dead.

On the brain activity monitor, something ensued that Baekho wasn’t qualified to judge but which was clearly different than before.

Then the dead boy sent as fast as his thoughts allowed. “The Shadow has four active locations left. I can see their coordinates. There are twenty seven agents of the void left. I can see their names. The recruitment process involves use of a barely tested eldritch device located in Siberia, which has unreliable mind control properties. This is the one he wants to use for his endgame. The Shadow’s current location is a hotel in Prague.”

Twenty seconds to go.

“Nine devices are left but only three of them are currently useable or have been fully figured out. I can see their location’s too. One is being worked on right now by seven researchers. Also, there were other Kaiju but they died in captivity.”

Ten seconds.

“Operatives Bai from sector two and Cheung from sector eight are double agents and feed information to the Shadow. There is an undetectable program on the computer in the accounting main office that sends our internal communication to him, too.”

Four, three…

“Wait! What’s that? Why are you-“

A shiver went through the link as something _replaced_ Junior in the network.

Doctor Feng tore the cover under the ice bags away, casting all bags to the ground. Jason threw the heating blanket over Junior.

Baekho shifted halfway into Twi – involuntarily. He was in the gray world and yet he was able to dimly perceive the people in the room. Neither here nor there. Then he popped back and Ren shifted instead. How was it possible that the empath could go into Twi on his own?

A second later Baekho knew the precise degree of Aron’s panic without having to look at the boy. Every nuance of the American’s emotional experience was clear as day to the white tiger. Was this how Ren saw the world?

The next second – just as Ren popped back, visibly distressed – Baekho knew with unyielding certainty that Doctor Feng’s owned two bicycles. That had to be Junior’s ability. What was going on? Why were their powers mixing?

By now the doctor had injected the flatlining boy with adrenaline and Jason was done slapping the defibrillator’s pads on their designated spots.

Minhyun’s link net broke but was immediately reestablished.

“That’s not me!” the dream-walker yelled. “It’s her! She’s forced herself in.”

Her?

“Cease immediately,” Lady Luck sent through the new link. “This was a grave mistake. You have breached the barrier. End this before they can enter. I will see if they can be delayed. ”

Junior returned into his original place in the net and Baekho felt the center of the linkage move back to Minhyun.

A high beeping noise came from the defibrillator. Junior was getting an electroshock. His body convulsed, but the line spiked only once before falling flat again.

Fog entered the room from nowhere. It looked eerily familiar – almost exactly like the substance Twi’s light seemed made of. As Junior received the second shock, the fog began to condense. Baekho felt Minhyun drop him out of the link.

Within seconds the fog took shape. They were vaguely humanoid. Baekho felt reminded of Rogue Conmotes, but these new things were made of an ever more ethereal substrate, not even becoming fully opaque. There were three of them, near the center of the room.

The third shock brought Junior’s heartbeat back. Ren hurried over to take his hand.

Meanwhile the operatives tried to close in on the strange fog things.

Soundlessly, the cloudlike beings took to the air and descended upon the approaching people in a high arc. Two of them hit an agent each and _entered_ their bodies. The third made it across the room to Jason and sunk into the assistant’s skin.

With a stone faced expression, Jason tore a screen off its mounting and threw it at the doctor who went down from the impact. The two possessed agents slashed their bare hands into the third’s throat, digging at his flesh until his neck artery burst. As the blood squirting man fell to the ground, the two pulled their guns and opened fire on the boys.

Aron was already touching the ground and whisked the projectiles out of the air as he transfigured the floor into a thick bulletproof glass barrier between the possessed men and the rest. Jason was attempting to stab Junior’s motionless body with a pen but a small Conmote of Ren’s making engaged him.

This had all gone so terribly wrong.


	47. Idle in the Maze (3)

_[Some blood mention]_

“Baekho!” Minhyun called out from the sofa where he held Aron upright. Then a link slammed into the white tiger’s mind and he heard the dream-walker’s voice at the speed of thought.

“I linked with Junior. The body snatchers – these ghoulish things – he knows how to fight them.”

Already Baekho was breaking out of his shock and rushed over to Jason who had dropped the stabbing device and tried to strangle Ren with a monitor cable. The empath’s Conmote was pulling the Chinese assistant’s arms away from its master.

“Drag Jason into Twi,” Minhyun sent, “then let go. Don’t let it possess you. If we lose you, it’s all over. You’re the only one who can fight them.”

Baekho was all the way around the bed and grabbed Jason from behind. The possessed boy wasn’t letting go of Ren and so all three of them shifted together.

As soon as Baekho saw the twilight he pulled his hands back and the struggling duo popped out of sight. The ghoul stayed behind in Twi with him – a Jason-shaped cloud, dissipating into an incoherent outline. The name fit. It was as ghoulish an apparition as he could imagine. The being rushed at Baekho but the boy returned to reality in time.

The ghoul stayed behind – destroyed.

Of course. If it was able to stay in Twi independently that was the key to fight them. Twi only existed when Baekho was there. It was generated anew whenever he shifted. With him gone, the ghoul had to vanish.

Now the only problem was getting to the other two.

Junior was awake.

“Find the ghouls,” the leader whispered with a hoarse voice. “Only you can end them. Whatever you do, don’t get possessed.”

“Rest easy,” Baekho said. “I’ll do everything I can.”

Junior closed his eyes. Ren wasn’t leaving his side. Jason helped the doctor back on her feet. She was bleeding badly and hobbled over to the first aid kit, supported by the assistant.

Baekho turned to the exit, which was still blocked off by Aron’s glass barrier. The possessed men had fled. The American waved him closer and melted a man-sized hole into the thick glass. “Good luck. Minhyun will keep you linked.”

“You’re not coming with me?” Baekho said with quite some surprise. Just because Aron couldn’t drag the ghouls into Twi didn’t mean he wouldn’t be highly helpful.

“Can’t,” Aron said. “If I get possessed they might be able to use my powers. If they’re going for death and destruction we can’t risk that.”

“Sorry,” Minhyun sent. “Ren’s the same. I’m more useful here. The only one who could come with you and not risk total catastrophe is Junior and he’s out of commission.”

Jason was suddenly beside them. “Are you going to fight?” His Korean was accentuated but passable. “People with powers shouldn’t get possessed, right?”

“Not if we can avoid it,” Baekho said.

“But I can come with you,” the Chinese boy said. “I know the buildings – every room, every shortcut. You don’t need to worry. I’m disposable.”

Normally this would have been a heartfelt, sappy moment to tell the assistant that he was invaluable and should protect himself and so on, but Baekho had lost enough time already and he really _did_ need somebody who knew the area.

“Alright. Come with me.”

Then he left through the glass’s hole and Jason followed. Baekho did his best not to look at the blood stained body on the floor.

As Aron closed the barrier behind them, Jason pulled out a phone and speed dialed somebody within the facility. While they left the chamber behind and rushed along the corridor to the central crossing of their level of the building, the boy was speaking rapid Chinese with the person on the other line.

He directed Baekho to the right, the right again and down the stairs into the gallery running along the two level high cafeteria. They heard gun fire before they arrived.

One of the possessed agents was down with multiple bullet wounds. The other one had a standoff with a series of operatives behind flipped tables. They were all in uniform but only a few were armed. Non-combatant staff was still leaving through the kitchen at the other end of the room.

“Jason, tell them to stop shooting!”

Baekho didn’t wait. He shifted and flew down as fast as possible. The moment he was where he had last seen the possessed, he popped. The agent was right in front of him, his back turned to the white tiger, his gun aimed at the impromptu barricade.

It took all of one second to grab the man, shift, let go, make sure the ghoul was there, and pop back.

Upon return, the freed agent collapsed next to the body of his comrade, who lay dead in a puddle of his own blood. Baekho waved at the other operatives, signaling his success. Was it over?

Faintly he saw the second ghoul – the one that must have left the dead agent upon loss of life. The white, foggy being had been hovering above the scene, blending in with the high, white ceiling. Now it rushed towards its next host.

Both Baekho and Jason yelled in their respective languages, but there was no action that would have saved the victim. As the ghoul entered the short man, Baekho got ready to sprint over. But then the possessed guy reached out and held onto the hand of his neighbor, a female operative who struggled to escape the iron grip.

At first Baekho through the ghoul was changing hosts for some reason as white, semi-transparent strings streamed off the possessed man and into the woman’s hand. But they both took on the same stone-faced expression and the woman threw herself at the leading officer behind her, immediately letting her stream flow into his head. Meanwhile the first man opened fire on his comrades before they knew what was happening.

The ghouls could multiply.

Shoes squeaking on the plastic floor, Baekho ran across the space and flung himself at the group. His hands landed on the first man and the woman. He shifted and landed, not holding onto the two people. As he felt the nebulous beings behind him, he popped.

The possessed lead officer aimed his gun at him, one hand on a young guy on the ground who was receiving the white stream.

Baekho had no intentions of dying from gun wounds and shifted into Twi to save himself, abandoning the group for the time being. He flew up to the gallery, out of sight of the mad officer.

Jason jumped as the white tiger popped out next to him. There were no more gunshots below, which was probably a bad sign.

“Tell everyone to leave,” Baekho said. “Nobody can cross paths with possessed people.”

Nodding, Jason speed dialed a number. To Baekho he said “That was the general down there. I think they don’t have anyone to coordinate them now.”

“Just evacuate then. Everybody.”

While the Chinese boy spoke into his phone, Baekho sent the course of events through the link. To his surprise, Junior was awake to answer. “Their goals are unclear to me," the leader sent, "but certainly not compatible with our existence. Ghouls aren’t separate entities, but not a hive mind either. It’s difficult to…doesn’t matter. Bottom line, they will spread as far as they feel the need to. I think you should come back. Minhyun has to sever the link now. Aron will give you a more direct path.”

Before Baekho could ask for clarifications, the connection terminated. He felt his mind snap back into its isolated state as the immaterial tentacle retracted.

Jason wasn’t done talking but the sirens came on, facility-wide. Over loudspeaker the order to completely evacuate – spoken by a mechanical, prerecorded voice – came in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, English and Japanese.

Then the walls behind the two boys broke and reconfigured to form an entrance to a slightly ascending tunnel, made from concrete, pipes and metal beams. It lead all the way directly into the flatline chamber.

Aron came towards them and they met halfway. He could walk fairly well, but it seemed that he wasn’t able to run or unwilling to try.

“Where are you going?” Baekho asked.

“Garage,” Aron said, a bit out of breath. He had ditched his crutch to be quicker but it was probably more exhausting that way. “Once everybody left I’ll wreck every form of transportation the possessed ones could use to get to the city. If I stay in my own tunnels I should be able to avoid any ghoul infestation.”

An explosion was audible and the ground vibrated.

Aron looked in the direction of the sound as if he could see through walls. “They’re using grenades to keep the ghouls from reaching the evacuees.” He sighed. “Good luck then.”

They walked past each other and Aron sealed the tunnel behind them. The duo continued onward into the chamber.

Junior was awake. He waved Baekho closer.

Ren spoke on his behalf. “Once everybody has left you’ll have to go out again and deal with the rest.”

“I know,” Baekho said.

“Don’t let them possess you,” Ren continued. “You’re the only one who can beat them. But we’ll help.”

“How?”

The empath gestured towards the sofa where Minhyun was meditating. “He’s trying to link with the possessed people to figure out their positions. If we have the number and locations we should be able to direct you. But he can’t link with you, too, while doing that. Take this.”

Baekho took the small, bent item from Ren’s hand. It was an earpiece with microphone. Junior had the counterpart.

Now they had to wait for the dream-walker to tell them how bad the situation was already.


	48. Idle in the Maze (4)

The white tiger sprinted alone through the hallways of a completely empty facility.

Junior’s voice came over the headset, still weak but stable. “Minhyun has tuned into the ghoul’s um…let’s call it frequency. In any case he’s looking through their eyes now. There are about…what? Sixteen, he says.”

Eerie, lifeless office space all around. Everyone had left in a hurry. So far, so good. Aron had successfully set every remaining vehicle on fire and collapsed the helipad, burying the currently stationed aircraft. Other agents were on standby with missiles outside to bring the entire complex down if necessary. This base had no simple self-destruct button.

 Now if only Baekho could drag everybody possessed into Twi this would all be over. He had to avoid getting possessed himself while fighting or Nuest’s last hope would join the ranks of the supernatural entities.

 Except for the minor damage caused by Aron’s tunneling through the walls, the place was still standing. The areas affected by grenade fire were further ahead, close to the garages. The sprinkler system had put the fires out before failing from a series of pipe bursts. The lobby would be flooded ankle deep.

Most of the ghouls were still at the garage, trying to fashion some sort of transportation.

“They should be pretty much trapped,” Junior said. “Aron has sealed off every exit from the main building. And all the arsenals. Unfortunately the possessed have access to the weapons their hosts carried, so it might be possible for them to find a way out. The chances are below five percent as far as the security footage lets me see. We’ll keep Aron on standby, but I see terrible chances for him. They know how important he is. If he moves in to engage directly they’ll sacrifice pretty much _anything_ to infect him. That would mean game over.”

“What are the chances they can make it out through the garage?” Baekho was practically there. Only a staircase separated him from the remains of the base’s cars. Any further and they would spot him.

“Fluctuates wildly,” Junior said. “The hosts aren’t mechanics and I don’t even know if the ghouls have access to the host’s skills anyway. Every decision can make or break part of their escape plan. But the longer we wait the better it becomes. Well, better for _them_.”

“Moving in. Talk to you when I’m back.”

“Understood. Good luck.”

Baekho shifted and flew the rest of the way down, slamming the door open. He surveyed the space while remaining in Twi. He knew the spot where most of them stood according to Minhyun’s description.

The possessed had chosen the least damaged wreckage and buzz sawn off everything burned, leaving only the underbody. It was a sizable truck’s bottom part. The wheels had not survived Aron’s general assault but the ghouls had found a total of four spare ones. It seemed they had been in the middle of fixing another wrecked truck’s intact motor to this one – surely the most difficult part of the entire endeavor.

Baekho flew up high and sat down on a metal beam that reached across the width of the ceiling, carrying thick cables.

He popped out, far enough above the possessed to remain undetected. Now he could see them. Ten were working on the motor or the fuel tank in some capacity. Two seemed to guard the area. Four scanned the wrecks for material. If only Aron had gotten another minute to be more thorough.

What could he do? If he freed a few, the remaining ones would re-possess them. Or worse, shoot them, in which case he might as well have Aron bring down the building right now.

Quietly, he spoke to Junior, mostly confirming everything Minhyun already saw. The leader didn’t have a plan either. As the minutes passed, it became increasingly obvious that there was no way for one boy to get everybody out alive. They might have to give up on the host agents and call in the heavy arms.

If only they moved around more, he could pick them off one by one.

Of course!

“Junior, I need a distraction. Something that makes them scatter just a bit. If I can get to each one just in time I might be able to kill all ghouls before they can spread back to the freed people.”

The leader grunted. “I was actually thinking of the exact opposite idea right now. If we can get them together into one pile you could drag them all at once. If you miss one or two you’d just have to shift and pop repeatedly to make sure you get everyone.”

“I think there are too many for that. And I’d need Aron here to turn the floor into a funnel.”

“Actually,” Junior said, “I was considering letting you snatch one, free him and then drag him through Twi into a safe area so they’d become fewer over time. I just don’t know how to keep them from noticing.”

“So, distraction it is?”

Junior was quiet for a moment. “Would they even react? If we had sleeping gas…When Aron comes back I’ll ask him if he can create that somehow. Maybe as a solid frozen block.”

The half-truck started up successfully.

“Oh no,” Baekho whispered. “It’s too late.”

None of the possessed made a sound or showed any sign of joy at their success. Then the engine died with a pathetic squeal and their only reaction was to fix the part that had failed.

“Okay,” Baekho said. “Not to late yet. But they’re practically done. I’m moving in. If I’m fast enough I can pick them off and drag the freed ones to a safe spot.”

Junior hesitated for a moment. “Can you reach the lockers at the other end of the hall?”

“I guess. They won’t see me there. Why?”

“Grab a bullet proof vest from locker bee-nine. Your chances will rise dramatically.”

“Gotcha.”

 

***

 

The white tiger took a minute to pick a target, then he shifted and descended towards the spot at top speed.

He entered reality directly on top of the leading officer. The moment he fell onto the man he shifted them both and kicked himself away. As soon as the man had popped back and left his ghoul behind, Baekho did the same and hit the ground back in reality.

Likely the other possessed were realizing what had happened but Baekho didn’t spare them a thought. He grabbed the officer and re-shifted to get them out of potential gun fire.

“Can you hear me?” he asked in his best Mandarin.

“Y-yes… where-“ The officer was confused, but didn’t try to resist his rescue.

“You got possessed but you’re better now. Let’s go. We’ll have to stay in Twi. You know what that is?”

The man looked around the silent, gray-lit place. “I… I read the introduction brochure when I got my promotion. I never thought-”

“Great. Hold on.”

Baekho lifted the man up and wished gravity irrelevant. He carried the officer to the door into the staircase and without letting go opened it from the inside. Once out in the corridor on a higher level, the boy brought them back to reality, pointed the freed man towards the chamber where the others were and told Junior to expect a visitor.

Minhyun confirmed that there were only fifteen ghouls left.

This was going to be slow, but at least it seemed to work.

He made his way back into the garage and popped on top of the metal beam where he had been hiding previously. The ghouls weren’t looking for him – because they had finished the truck. It started and stayed on. The engine sounded a bit tortured but the wheels turned steadily as the designated driver moved it towards the exit.

Only five possessed had taken a seat on the naked underbody. If Baekho grabbed the whole car he could shift them all at once and free five people. But what then? He couldn’t carry five. Briefly he wondered if he would be able to lift the truck in Twi and flip it over to make it useless, but that seemed unlikely from prior experience. Being able to fly did not substitute for superstrength.

Thanks to Minhyun the others already knew what was happening and Jason alarmed the soldiers outside. Baekho could hear the orders being given in the background of his headset’s transmissions.

The automatic door got stuck before it had opened far enough to allow the vehicle through. The lights went out, too. Aron had turned off the electricity. It didn’t seem to affect the truck’s engine though.

Possessed agents not riding the truck facilitated the escape. Three grenade launchers were fired in parallel, setting the door’s mounting ablaze. Crude but it did the job. The gate came free and fell over, allowing an unobstructed way out. Then they all jumped onto the vehicle, holding on wherever possible.

Maybe if he shifted the entire thing _now_ … but it was already gaining too much speed to catch up.

The rotor blade noise of several helicopters echoed from the high walls of the complex and the surrounding mountains. Three aircrafts rose above the horizon. They were the narrow kind where pilot and weapons officer are seated in tandem – attack choppers.

“No, wait,” Junior yelled, probably at Jason who had to be their contact to the pilots. “This is bad. Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot the ghouls!”

Fifteen men and women on a makeshift car drove along the concrete between buildings. As soon as they were out on open ground, every helicopter fired its full arsenal of missiles. Twenty-four laser-guided rocket-driven explosives hit the truck in sequence.

The continuous explosion was so bombastic the debris from the ground broke every window facing the site. Baekho had to evade the wave of shards flying through the open gate into the garage.

No one could have survived this.

Unless they were immaterial.

Fifteen foggy entities rose from the hellfire and recombined on their way up. As only four separate beings remained they latched onto the two closest helicopters. One ghoul for each crewmember.

The third aircraft turned around but could not flee in time. Machinegun fire brought it down. It crashed into a roof and went up in flames.

Two attack helicopters, piloted by the possessed, turned towards the city and moved away at high speed. Not long until they were out of sight.

And there was no vehicle left in the entire base to chase them.


	49. Idle in the Maze (5)

Running around like a headless chicken. That was all Baekho had done so far, he found. Oh, and making things worse. That had also been happening a few times today.

Flying in Twi would probably have gotten him back to the chamber faster, but he didn’t want to miss what was transpiring over his headset, even though Minhyun was free to link again. Junior hadn’t bothered to turn it off and was talking to someone.

“Help me up,” the leader said, probably to Ren. “I’ll try to find out more. Aron, clear the way.”

There was a bit of silence as somebody else spoke whom Baekho couldn’t hear.

“Of course that’s what I’ll do,” Junior continued. “I can’t exactly flatline again. My powers should still work, though. I feel like the overdrive from flatlining hasn’t fully decayed. Let’s try.”

Baekho came knocking at the door outside the chamber and the general opened. The man looked less confused now, holding a steaming coffee cup and having changed into a less formal and more practical uniform. At last Baekho got a look at the name tag – Lin, if he remembered the pronunciation of that character correctly.

General Lin looked old, which of course he was, but his face was that of a man who worried too much, gaining him an extra ten years of apparent age.

Behind him Junior knelt next to the mangled corpse in a huge puddle of still drying blood. The ghoul’s first victim had been covered with a spare sheet, but Nuest’s leader touched the exposed hand.

Doctor Feng and Aron were observing security camera footage at the medic’s desk. Jason had taken it upon himself to distribute hot beverages and biscuits from the tiny, adjacent breakroom.

Junior sucked in air sharply, unblinking. “Yes, I see everything I need to. Minhyun, can you use this?”

“I don’t…what?” The dream-walker furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand what you saw.”

Standing up on shaking legs, the leader made sure everybody could hear him. “There’s more than one way to fight the ghouls. Eliminating every instance of the infection would have been preferable but we’re not out of options.”

General Lin raised his hand. “I received a message. Everybody from the staff made it to the safe points with no casualties. But the helicopters are already over the city.”

“Then here’s what we do,” Junior said. “I didn’t get the full picture but I got a glimpse at the origin of…of a lot of stuff. For starters, Baekho’s Twi and Minhyun’s dream scape are two sides of one coin.”

That made everybody listen up. It wasn’t apparent how that helped them against the possessions but it could conceivably lead somewhere.

“Twi is the physical world without minds – without the quintessence of life and soul, of vitality. Perfectly sterile. But the scape is exactly that essence stripped of all physical components. They’re both incomplete images of reality that only exist as long as their creators can focus on them. If we combine those planes we might be able to enter a mirror reality where the ghouls are truly located. What we’ve seen so far are only the parts of them which extend into our world.”

The plan was difficult to develop and would probably be even harder to enact. If the properties of Twi and the scape could be woven together, the ghouls – being non-physical entities – could be engaged there without risk of spread.

But Junior wasn’t finished. “The big advantage we would have is – this is hard to explain – the entities are not separate things. They only spread because they need physical anchors, but they’re not actually multiplying. Every instance of a ghouls is a copy, or offspring, from the same source. In the Twi-scape-based realm I’m talking about, this source should be destructible, because we can affect them there like physical beings. We’d be… _on their level_.”

Aron cleared his throat. “There’s going to be a big disadvantage, too, isn’t there?”

“I’m afraid so. For one thing, we have no experience with this. It’s their home turf. The ghouls move naturally within the semi-reality we would enter. I suppose since we’d create the gateway to that realm, we could find a way to spin it to our advantage, but we have to hurry. Also…I have no clue what the source is or how to fight it.”

“Fantastic,” Aron said with an eye-roll. “Let’s get going then. To our doom.”

 

***

 

They didn’t go anywhere.

Junior gave detailed instructions to everyone separately, beginning with Minhyun.

Baekho used the opportunity to text his family who knew he was in China but thought he was there as part of his job, surveying prospective property for the Korean phantom company he ostensibly worked for. It was always a bit odd. He couldn’t – and didn’t want to – tell his mother that he had barely escaped the claws of death a few times today. He didn’t want to lie either. The best way around this dilemma he had found was to ask how relatives and friends were doing and let her summarize all the latest petty squabbling and relationship developments.

After a while the leader made his way to Baekho, who put his phone away.

“Here’s what I need you to do,” Junior said. “You remember how in the first attack of the agents of the void you got trapped in reality and couldn’t go into Twi?”

“How could I forget? What does that have to do with this here?”

“That night you weren’t locked out completely. You managed to pull some of the substrate of Twi into reality and use it as a weapon.”

Purely out of habit, Baekho reflexively summoned an orb.

Junior’s expression was tense. “I need you to do the exact opposite.”

“Huh?”

“When Minhyun has tuned us all into the frequency of the ghouls, you have to push yourself and us into Twi. We’ll sit close together to make it easier.”

Was the boy serious? Was it even possible to-

“Yes it does work,” Junior said.

How would he know-

“I’ve seen it during overdrive,” Junior interrupted Baekho’s thoughts.

But what were the cha-

“Twenty percent chance it’ll work on first try. Rising after that. You’ll get there.”

How did Junior know what to say? Was he-

“Reading the future,” the leader said. “Yep, I have to shorten this conversation because Minhyun will be ready in three, two, one.“

“I got it,” the dream-walker said for the whole room to hear from where he sat. “I can tune myself and Aron in so I should be able to add all of you now.”

 

***

 

The five boys of Nuest sat squished together on the broadest sofa. They couldn’t fit without struggle.

“Do we have to go in trance?” Ren asked. “Or are we going to that place physically? Because I don’t think I can stay like this. And Aron, your hand better not go any lower.”

“Sorry.”

Junior huffed, compressed in the middle of the group. “The answer to that is yes.”

Ren brushed his hair out of his face and into Aron’s. “This wasn’t a yes no question.”

“Anyway,” Junior said loudly. “Let’s begin. Minhyun, please.”

There was a knock on Baekho’s consciousness and he accepted the intrusion. It was unlike the links he knew. This one _pulled_. It was a cold sensation as if his brain had been laid bare and the air conditioning was blowing on it. He felt himself slowly falling into one particular direction but couldn’t say which one. Was it even in physical space?

“Now tiger boy,” Junior said, “Your turn.”

Baekho didn’t want to accidentally shift without his friends so he proceeded very slowly. He called to mind how he created Twi orbs, which was intuitive after the weeks of practice he had enjoyed. What would the exact opposite be?

He let the pulling in his mind guide him, hoping it would lead the right way.

The three non-superpowered individuals in the room flickered in and out of sight and the light changed irregularly. Every time Baekho managed to shift himself and the others closer to the pull it decreased like an elastic band being allowed back into its neutral position. It took active pushing to get them there.

After a good minute of flickering, the boys felt the impact of a shockwave as they broke through a barrier and were finally knocked into the realm of the ghouls.


	50. Idle in the Maze (6)

It wasn’t Twi. That much was obvious right away.

The world they had entered – traveling via sofa – looked just like Twi did with subdued, gray-ish colors and a lack of shadows or light sources. But it _felt_ wrong. The sensation on the skin, the taste of the air – even the nature of the eerie silence was different.

All of them had been to Twi multiple times on various occasions during training and in the field. It only took a look at their faces and Baekho knew they felt it just as much as he did.

“So we’re really here,” Aron said, standing up. “Ghoul-town. Ugly ambience. Zero-out-of-ten. Recommend redecoration.”

Baekho took to the air. Flying still worked. So far so good. Summoning Twi orbs was also possible – easier than usual even. Whatever this strange realm was, it had to be a lot closer to whatever plane the twilight power came from.

The others tried the same way of leaving the sofa and managed to fly all on their own which they had to get used to for a minute. Then Ren furrowed his brow.

“This is odd,” the empathy said. “I can still perceive Jason and the doctor. Their emotions aren’t cut off like they would be if I was in Twi. The General is leaving by the way. If I interpret his feeling correctly he’s eager to get the staff back into the compound.”

“Aron, explode a thing,” Junior said.

“Wha- Okay?” The American caused the half empty coffee can on the table to tear itself apart – glass shattered, metal melted, coffee evaporated.

“Ren,” Junior said. “Anything from the others?”

“Nope. No reaction. I don’t think changes here propagate to reality.”

The leader cracked his knuckles. “Alright. No caution necessary. Aron make us an exit.”

“Yes, sir.”

One hand motion and everything above the chamber – including its ceiling – were whisked aside with thundering noise.

The five boys rose into the stale, motionless air above the color desaturated world. In a loose formation – Junior at front – they moved towards Jade-Lion-City.

 

***

 

The historic city sprawled crescent shaped along the shore of the Jade-Lion basin, traditional tiled coverings with upturned ends and roof charms stretched out until the hills gave way to flatter terrain where homogenous, prefabricated buildings were common until high-rise constructions took over.

Over a million people. The reach of the body snatchers was already increasing exponentially.

Nuest was headed towards a populous, modern district bordering on the historical city. The tallest buildings surrounding a subdivided market square bustling with activity. Two helicopters were parked too closely between stalls, ignoring all safety protocols.

“There’s a whole lot of panic,” Ren said, “but I can sense people dropping out of my grasp all over the place. The ghouls must be infecting a dozen every second.”

They landed in the middle of the square, empty stalls and gray-ish trees loosely surrounded them.

“Where are they?” Aron asked.

“This is supposed to be their realm,” Junior said, eyes narrow. “I expected them to be here, in a more tangible form. Something we can fight. But I’m afraid they may be even less easily touched in their home world. Minhyun?”

Everybody turned towards the dream-walker. Around them – in reality – civilians were being converted, their bodies possibly already used for widespread destruction. All the boys could see was an abandoned city scape.

“I’m trying to sense specifics,” Minhyun said slowly, “but it’s like I’m being deflected. The ghouls are right here. The _source_ is here. I can vaguely sense the pull through the link network. Maybe they divert my powers. Maybe there are multiple, spread out sources. Maybe they’re naturally camouflaged.”

“Great,” Baekho groaned. His adrenaline was dropping and replaced by cold horror. They were standing right in front of the ghouls but now the body snatchers weren’t just unbeatable, they were invisible, too. “Can anything go right today?”

The white tiger kicked a crushed lemonade can from the stone path onto a patch of grass.

Minhyun whipped his head around as if tracing an unseen projectile. “What did you do?”

“Wha- what?” Baekho looked back and forth between his shoes and the can. “Why? What did I do? Nothing?”

“It moved,” Minhyun said.

“What moved?” Junior asked.

“Everything. The source. The whole network vibrated a tiny bit exactly where the can flew.” Minhyun dashed around, shoving merchandise on display, rattling wooden posts and shuffling trash on the ground.

“It’s not real,” he said. “This part of the city is completely different. The location is where my link has drawn me to. Not anything here, but the _here itself_.”

“Why would this be a special place,” Junior said to no one in particular. “Unless…it isn’t. Yes, that’s it. Whatever place the ghouls are clustered around in the real world – the corresponding place in this realm acts as the source. That explains why they spread so inefficiently. Why didn’t some ghouls leave the head quarter immediately? Why did they all jump onto the truck together? Why did both helicopters land in the same area? Why not split up at all? Because they can’t! They have to stick together. They’re a hive mind in this aspect.”

“What do we do then?” Baekho asked.

Junior turned to the American. “Aron? Wreck this place.”

“With pleasure.”

Spreading his arms, Aron looked around with a grin on his face. The traditional stalls exploded in clouds of splinters and sawdust. Trees went up in flame and burned to a crisp within seconds. The ground opened as if an earthquake was casually walking through.

“Get down!” Junior yelled.

The world reacted. Violently.

The eruption of bursting concrete barely missed Baekho’s head. Several pieces impacted on his skin, sure to leave him black and blue.

All of them took to the air. Rising above the dust, Baekho saw the radius of the area that acted as source. A perfect circle, extending all the way to the high rise buildings, broke house by house and drew nearer, as if to cut them off.

Bursting stone, wood and concrete echoed through the realm’s quiet. Buildings were pulled and pushed by invisible forces, moving along streets and gardens as if drifting on water, crashing into fence posts, rhododendrons and letterboxes.

As the first houses came close enough to be dragged onto the market square they _lifted off_.

More and more houses came flying, encircling the boys from every direction. The torn buildings were held steadily in the air at every possible angle. Aron vaporized the one’s that came too close but it was clear that the house weren’t out to crush the boys – they formed into a three dimensional maze.

Nuest was in the middle of a rough sphere of concrete. Stray pieces hovered in place. Everything outside became increasingly obscured by layers of airborne shelters.

From the ground below, ghouls rose up into the center of the maze. The white, vibrating strings combined to a single entity the size of a zeppelin.

“Get down!” Junior yelled again. “I mean, get…uh, sideways.”

The huge entity wasn’t fully formed yet and already fragmented into tentacles that reached for the nearest piece of concrete and threw it at the boys.

All of them dodged the first few, then Aron began intercepting the assault with his own – forcing entire houses and plasma orbs in the projectiles’ way.

Baekho conjured Twi orbs and bombarded the enormous creature. None of them impacted properly, instead passing through the entity, only dispersing the foggy substance momentarily. Every hole closed as fast as it was punched.

Aron was frozen in place, focused on keeping everybody save. “Anyone…know…a way…to help?” he sent.

“Yes, brilliant!” Junior shouted, grinning brightly at Ren.

The empath smiled back. “So I assume what I just decided to try is going to work?”

“What’s going to work?” Baekho asked.

“The ghouls had to leave the human bodies to come into the realm and fight us,” Ren sent, his eyes closed in concentration. “But with all the frightened victims back in reality I now have… _an army_!”

 Though the dust of busted concrete was building up fast, Baekho could see the Conmotes as soon as the first few disfigured humanoids made their way through the spherical maze. They, too, were able to resist gravity as they wished within the realm and clawed their way right into the big ghoul-blob’s ‘flesh’. Despite being as successful as Baekho’s ammunition, the Conmotes were so numerous – there had to be hundreds already – their continued assault dissipated the blob’s outer layer.

Aron and Ren were both fighting with all they had. Junior had assumed the role of the strategist, predicting the path of the debris. Minhyun, of course, kept them all linked which was how they had to communicate to remain a functional unit during battle.

Baekho was idly hovering around, trying not to get hit. Which wasn’t hard seeing as the blob was unconcerned with him.

He had not one thing to contribute. What could he do? How ironic that the place which allowed him to make Twi orbs quicker and easier than before was the place where he had no use for them.

Deep in gloomy though, he realized too late that the battle had moved within the sphere and he had left Aron’s immediate field of view.

When a loose wall came flying at him, he didn’t even have time to call out for help. Tons of bricks slammed into his head at an obtuse angle.

Baekho lost consciousness and the link with Minhyun snapped from his blacked-out mind.

He dropped back into reality and went free falling above the city.


	51. Idle in the Maze (7)

Baekho awoke while drowning.

He was underwater, only half done regaining consciousness, and his first breath was about to be his last. Purely out of instinct, he shifted.

The white tiger hadn’t even purposefully remembered that this allowed him to quench his body’s need for air. It had been a reflex. Now he was dripping wet within the dark waters of Twi, unable to tell up from down through his all-consuming headache.

With a few deep non-breaths he calmed his pulse until he was able to assess the situation. He was cut off from his friends and had no way of getting back to them. There was probably a cerebral concussion to worry about, maybe even a skull fracture. The boy touched his wet hair where the wall had met him. There was blood but not much. This could wait.

Accelerating upward, Baekho pieced it all together. He had fallen from the sky when he popped out of the ghoul-realm. By all means he should be dead. But the maze-sphere had shifted, which was the reason he had left Aron’s range without even moving. And the reason he had survived.

Baekho broke through the surface of Twi’s corresponding version of the Jade-Lion basin. The unmoving atmosphere of Twi did little to dry him, letting his clothes stick to his frame. A gray and silent city lay before him.

What else was he to do but make his way back to base and hope?

There was no telling if he shook from the cold or the shock or the fear for his friends’ safety.

As he hovered over the town he noticed a few severe marks of destruction. Whatever the possessed had done it had probably caused a few fires to go unattended. He had to help if he could.

Landing in an alley between two cottages where he was confident he would remain unseen, he popped. And almost shifted immediately as he saw the blob hovering above the district.

How had it made its way back into reality and why was it here? Junior would probably have been able to tell him. What did it want? What…

Baekho stepped out of the alley and narrowed his eyes. The blob was filamenting into tentacles that grabbed invisible objects out of the air and hurled them at invisible foes. It wasn’t just in reality. The ghouls had to travel in the real world to move at the corresponding points in their realm.

It was a gamble and there was no Junior to tell him the odds. He had to do it anyway. Because it was _something to do_.

Baekho shifted.

There wasn’t much point in aiming precisely. The huge thing was unmissable. The white tiger flew as fast as Twi would let him and was above the mega-ghoul’s position within seconds.

Baekho popped.

A wreathing white mass underneath him. He plummeted. Gamble number one: Would it immediately possess him upon contact?

The very seconds he entered the vaguely defined borders of the entity – or rather, fell through them – he shifted, taking the entity with him entirely. Gamble number two: Would this remove the entity from the corresponding point in its own realm?

Within the same second he had entered Twi, he left it again. Without the ghoul, hopefully making it vanish like its constituent creatures. That was gamble number three.

He popped out in free fall with no white streams in sight. If the entity could exist independently it would still wait for him in Twi and likely possess him right away now that he was an obvious threat. Gamble number four.

Once the ground was as close as he could it possibly allow to come, he shifted again and found himself in a wonderfully empty Twi with no amorphous ghoul-mass in sight. The boy broke his fall and gracefully touched down in another tight, dark alley. The historical district barely had any other street type anyway.

Then came gamble number five and he had no way of affecting the outcome: Would the spherical maze collapse as soon as the entity had been destroyed? If so, would Aron or Ren be quick enough to protect them? Would Minhyun know to pull the plug? Could they land in time or would they try to safe themselves only to fall to their deaths?

A link slammed into his mind hard enough to make him stagger. “Baekhooooooooo! Where are you? Please be alive. Please please please.”

“I’m here, Minhyun,” he sent with a grin. “But where are you?”

“Market square. Or what’s left of it. Junior warned us that the thing was going to vanish and it would all come down on us.”

Junior joined the conversation through the reestablished link network. “Since I only knew moments in advance, somebody must have made a split second decision. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”

“Sure do.” Baekho chuckled to himself, unsure if laughter could travel through the link. “You’re welcome by the way.”

 

***

 

The headquarters had survived surprisingly intact. They would have to move again regardless. For one thing their location was compromised. The ghoul incident wasn’t exactly traceable to them but hanging around and waiting until somebody got the idea of asking questions about that factory/refinery/military-base-thing standing secluded in the mountains was probably a fast way to get exposed.

But for the moment all of Nuest needed rest. The things to worry about would still be there in the morning. Unfortunately.

Baekho took a shower and dropped into his bed without even getting his head treated. A little disinfectant on the wound was going to have to suffice. Doctor Feng hadn’t protested. She was as shaken as the rest of the staff and probably wanted to get some shut-eye herself.

The boy didn’t wake up as his mind was forced into a link. He became lucid but was not pulled into the dream scape. Instead he stumbled right into the throne room of Lady Luck. Four more boys were by his side within the second.

“I greet and welcome you,” the shining woman said. “Drawing you here is not the course of action for which I wished. It is to my regret such length has become necessary and furthermore I am only now able to utilize it, as control has been gained over the breach in the barrier caused by your reckless actions.”

“Hey!” Junior said, pointing an accusing finger at her. “Listen here, you… uh, you.“

“The universe,” Lady Luck continued undeterred, “this universe – _your_ universe – is but a minuscule component within the Ring. And this Ring is the superstructure containing only a finite number of branches of the multiverse, septillions at most. The Ring itself in turn is superseded and contained within the Hierarchy.”

“What?” Junior said softly, lowering his hand.

“Traveling from one Ring to another is so difficult, for all practical purposes it is impossible. Even for the likes of _us_. Unless there is aid from inside. If a species were to advance enough to open the gate from their side but not sufficiently powerful to become a threat to Hierarchy-travelers, then an invasion would be, by comparison, a trivial matter. Such is the philosophy of the Void. They are a powerful race of travelers, seeking lifeforms such as you and breaching the barrier to your Ring enough to insert objects of unimaginably great power.”

Aron gasped. “The eldritch devices.”

“It is the wish of my kind to prevent these occurrences, to create a fruitful and cooperative structure throughout the Hierarchy based on mutual trust and independent trade. The one you call Shadow has been the first to discover the abilities bestowed by the use of Void technology. I have done my best to warn him but-“

“Why don’t you stop him?” Ren yelled.

Lady Luck sighed and here light seemed to dim. “You overestimate my abilities. I can barely reach across the barrier. As much as I want to assist, I can solely act through my agents – you. Only in moments your mind is most open can I communicate at all, as was when I bestowed you.”

“Bestowed?” Baekho asked, putting the pieces together. “We got our abilities from _you_?”

“I cannot stay longer. Already the linkage is deteriorating. The Shadow is on the move, but yet you may have the advantage. What powers the Void technology has bequeathed to him, I cannot say for certain. What he might plot, even less. Long have I observed human activity and yet learned so little.”

“Wait,” Minhyun said, “You called me son last time. Why did you do that? Do you know where my sis-“

Baekho jolted awake in his bed, drenched in cold sweat.


	52. Healing Time - H

_[Mature content for much of the chapter. Explicit but not particularly graphic.]_

The precautionary measures made by Junior included dismantling every department of the head quarter that could be outsourced. A lot of the non-essential staff had left before the end of the day despite what official employment contracts allowed. There was no point in keeping anyone from fleeing after what had happened.

So it came that Ren didn’t meet a single soul on his way back to the bedroom. He moved slowly as to not drop any of the puddings he carried. Fifteen cups, three flavors.

No one from Nuest was going to be able to find back to sleep anyway. But if they were going to take on the Shadow tomorrow in earnest, being tired wasn’t going to help. A full stomach could probably turn him sleepy.

After the encounter with Lady Luck he had decided to raid the cafeteria’s fridge for the week’s ration of sweet treats. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to ask for them now that the organization was reduced to a skeleton crew. And it would be a shame to let those puddings go past their expiry date.

Balancing his cargo carefully, Ren leaned against the door to his room and hooked his elbow into the handle to press it down without having to use or move his hands. It took three tries but eventually he managed to let himself in.

Junior would be long done showering and was probably sprawling on the bed naked. Whether Ren would eat his heap of dessert first or later would be a spontaneous decision depending on what Junior was willing to do to trump a truckload of pudding.

But all Ren found was a room devoid of anyone else. There were traces of a struggle. The bed was disheveled, Junior’s bathrobe was on the ground and everything on the nightstand had been brushed off.

Ren dropped one cup – chocolate flavor.

After a second of terrible quiet, Junior and Baekho popped back into reality. The latter vigorously impaling the former and grunting at every thrust. Their bodies glistened with sweat.

Ren dropped two more cups – both vanilla. The sight wasn’t technically uncommon, but he had always given explicit permission to the two, usually on the condition to watch or occasionally join. It was an unspoken agreement that the three had, or at least Ren had thought there _was_ an agreement.

After about ten more thrusts, the muscular boy on top of Ren’s boyfriend realized that they weren’t alone and even though he grinned innocently for one second, the white tiger’s mind seemed to jump to the right conclusion quickly.

Junior whined softly and twisted under the bigger boy, but as soon as he noticed where Baekho was looking, he too saw Ren and his eyes widened.

“We, uh,” Junior said, slowing down his breathing. “We thought, because…”

Another cup fell – chocolate again – and Ren got over his shock, changing into angry boyfriend mode. He didn’t feel like this counted as cheating but the duo had definitely gone behind his back.

“Look,” Baekho said, “It’s my fault. I didn’t want to wait. He told me to, but after ten minutes we thought you were probably staying in the mess hall, eating yourself into a food coma. We didn’t think…”

Junior looked up at the boy who was still inside him. “I think you should leave.”

“Right, okay.”

“Wait, not like-“

Baekho shifted, thus leaving the leader’s body and the room.

Suddenly empty, Junior shuddered. “Whoa! That felt weird. …So Ren, ready to take over where tiger boy left off?”

Ren dropped all cups except the one in his hand – pistachio – and tore off the lid before throwing the container at his boyfriend. Of course, Junior could see it coming but he had the decency not to move away. The green gob hit the precog in the chest and exploded across his torso, spattering drops on his face.

Ren huffed. “Just because I can tell exactly how guilty you feel doesn’t mean you don’t still have to apologize.”

With deliberately slow gestures, Junior wiped some pudding off his stomach and licked it off his own fingers, never breaking eye contact. He leaned back until he was laying down, supported by his elbows. His legs were spread wide. “You won’t let this go to waste, right?”

“The pudding or you?”

“Yes.”

One last time, Ren threateningly narrowed his eyes, before deciding the opportunity was indeed too good to stay mad. He had to extract a proper apology from the slender boy. There were a few techniques he could think off. Maybe he’d even have to call Baekho back in. Either way he’d have Junior beg for mercy. The boy knew what was coming but this was no obstacle, it was a challenge.


	53. Prince of Tomorrow (1)

Expecting to oversleep, Junior had set an alarm for himself. For years now, he had never actually gotten to hear his phone’s buzz. He didn’t even remember what the ringtone sounded like. His future-sight didn’t turn off during sleep and thus he could subconsciously feel the moment the ringing would begin with 100 % certainty. The precog could trust his subconscious to wake him up seconds before the event.

As always, he deactivated the alarm just in time before it went off. Ren next to him kept sleeping soundly.

Within the first minute Junior stretched his sight in all directions, along all timelines available to him. For the moment, nobody had made any decision that would result in anything noteworthy. The chance of anyone bursting into his room or something of the sort was zero.

Well, no it wasn’t. Sometimes he had to remind himself that just because he couldn’t see something coming didn’t mean it was impossible. Anything that occurred with less than five percent probability was invisible to him – drowned out by the gossamer, ephemeral layers of his domain: The realm of possibility.

He got up as slowly as necessary to keep Ren’s chance of waking up below ten percent and took care not to step on any of the empty pudding cups strewn across the floor. Routinely, he checked his tablet and sifted through the flood of mail. Somehow taking the organization apart had failed to decrease the volume of messages he had to deal with. If anything he was getting more now as he wore multiple hats, having de facto taken over from the board of directors.

Most people had officially left. The bureaucracy of their terminations would be handled by external companies. He’d have to go over who was left as soon as everybody was up. He’d need every person available for the day’s main task – planning a preemptive attack on the Shadow.

Another thing he had to do was to check the stock market.

As he gazed upon the columns of numbers and diagrams, he rubbed sand from his eyes. One of his biggest investments had an eighty percent chance of crashing hard within the hour. The chance of crash _plus_ recovery was sixty percent. He sold most of it. Since the course was currently still going up, autonomous bot nets tore the stock from Junior’s virtual grasp as soon as he offered it.

A smaller company was about to go under with ninety-five percent likelihood and nobody knew yet. It was a bit tedious to go through all his individual phantom company’s profiles and sell their shares, now that he had nobody to do it for him. But he couldn’t let himself loose ten million dollars.

He could have done more if he wanted – acquiring new stock for example. There had been a time when it had felt great to snatch a bunch of shares minutes or even seconds before their value skyrocketed. This feeling had long given way to empty routine.

Ren twisted and turned, prying his eyes open. Junior had known the precise moment before he had picked up the tablet. Sleep cycles were fairly predictable.

“Morning sunshine,” he said.

“Mrgnlb,” Ren mumbled.

“What do you want for breakfast? I don’t know if there’s anyone who can restock but for the moment anything except pudding should be left.”

“Dunno.”

Junior called up his to-do and put ‘Decide where to move (Korea?)’ on the bullet point list right between ‘Take inventory of personnel’ and ‘Plan attack on Shadow’. At the bottom was ‘Investigate Lady Luck’, which had been there for ages since he still had no idea how to find out more about her, short of stopping his heart again.

After he had slipped into his jeans and a shirt, Junior called Jason, struggling into a cardigan at the same time. If the chance of Jason picking up had not jumped to a hundred percent right away it would have meant the assistant was still asleep and Junior would have hung up before waking him.

But as it stood, Jason was already active.

“Hello, boss.”

“Good morning,” Junior said. “Can you turn on the security footage in my office? It’s a bit paranoid but I want to have an eye on all entrances until we figure out a schedule for the remaining guards. Chief Lin didn’t resign, right? And chief Wang?”

“Both still around. Not up yet.”

Junior exhaled in relieve. Losing his internal and external chiefs of operation would have been hard to make up for.

“Okay, have them in my office when they’ve finished their first cup of coffee. Is there a list of damages from the ghoul attack?”

There was a moment of quiet as Jason looked up what his clip board contained. The moment the Chinese boy made the decision to speak, Junior instantly knew what he was going to say, hearing the future echo of the boy’s voice. He let Jason say his part anyway, because it was disconcerting and confusing for people when Junior preempted their part of the conversation.

“The lobby is flooded so we can’t turn electricity back on in tract B. The grenade damage means the main staircase to the garage is not structurally sound enough to use. Tract F has lost electricity, too, but I don’t know why yet. Basically every side entrance and the doors to all four arsenals are molten shut thanks to Aron.”

“I’ll have him fix that last item when I talk to him,” Junior said. “Although, I don’t think we need all those side entrances anyway. Less ground to cover is an advantage right now. We’ll give up on anything other than tracts A, C, E, and G. Maybe keep D, too, if we need the lab.

“Understood, leader,” Jason said. “I’ll see that everything from the damaged buildings is salvaged over the course of the afternoon.”

“Thanks. See you at breakfast.”

Ren had dressed and gotten his hair in a somewhat presentable shape. Wordlessly they left for the mess hall.

 

***

 

Everybody was in the cafeteria because the common room, the entertainment room and the main break room were all in the busted tract B, narrowing down the staff’s options.

Bullet holes in the tables and walls reminded of the battle with the body snatchers, but the tables in question had been righted and the blood had been mopped up.

Good to know certain things were still getting done around the place.

There might have been literally every single person who still worked at the facility and the sight was discouraging. Basically everybody with a family had left. So had everyone old enough to retire, which was a huge chuck of employees – the organization liked to recruit people who had experience and contacts, but tried to keep its hands out of the regular job market.

Junior sent Ren ahead and quickly talked to the head of every department to get an overview about the organization’s remaining capacity. Then he got himself a steaming cup of coffee.

He also made sure Jason could send someone down into the city to restock the kitchen. Every single cook had left, but they could probably recruit among Chief Wang’s men who were trained to survive out in the wild with nothing but an open fire and some rocks to fetch a meal. They’d probably be happy to use a microwave.

Then he finally made his way to Nuest’s table, finding his reserved spot next to Ren. There were enough pastries left for him to get the kind he wanted.

Minhyun fed Aron orange slices which the American boy accepted reluctantly.

“Getting used to real food again, huh?” Junior said, trying to sound at least a tiny bit jovial.

“My food _is_ real food,” Aron said. “I could make my own oranges if I wanted to.”

“So you just like having Minhyun force things down your throat?” Junior said, making Baekho choke on a quail egg.

The American reached across the table, waved his hand over Junior’s cup and grinned. As the leader looked down he found his coffee frozen solid. “Hey!”

Aron chewed down on an orange slice, still smiling.

Junior was about to get up and renew his beverage when the chance of Minhyun telling-off his boyfriend popped up at five percent and rapidly rose to twenty. Junior pouted and the chance jumped to forty. The leader drooped his shoulders and finally, ninety-five percent.

“Aron,” Minhyun said, “be nice.”

With a sigh, the scolded boy waved and Junior’s drink assumed its original temperature.

It seemed this was going to be a busy, though fortunately productive day. If Junior came up with a few good ideas and could rely on the help of his friends, he could get things back on track.

A familiar vibration set in – a shift in the realm of possibility. This only happened when a whole lot of probabilities changed at once. Usually as a result of somebody making a big decision, rarely from some wildly unlikely event randomly striking.

The leader dropped his cup, trembling in cold horror.

All timelines were truncated.

He was dead in four minutes, nine seconds.


	54. Prince of Tomorrow (2)

There was only one way an attack could have slipped his radar. The Shadow had found a way to let quantum number generators coordinate even more parts of his plan. Only now was the probability for a specific action above five percent – at a hundred.

“Aron!” Junior yelled, startling everyone in the whole room. “Shadow attack. Now. Four minutes till total destruction. Bring us two levels down. All of us.”

It took a second for the news to sink in but the American reacted quickly. The mess hall’s floor detached from the surrounding walls and descended. Everything underneath was vaporized by Aron’s temperature generation. The ground under their feet fractured as it hit the ground level.

General Lin was one of the first who came back onto their feet. “What do we have to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” Junior said. “I need to see the cameras. For now, we’re all dead. Follow me.”

Nuest rushed into the corridor adjacent to the place where they had landed and arrived at one of the doors with a number pad. While Junior entered his pin, the staff members assembled behind him. The thick steel doors opened and he slipped in as soon as the slit was wide enough for this thin frame.

Downward stairs lead to a platform where Lin took position to guide the personnel into a bunker. Junior himself ascended a staircase branching off the platform and by then Minhyun had linked all of Nuest.

The five boys, plus Jason and Chief Wang, entered a panic room where monitors came to live just as they arrived. A dozen displays showing security footage. Junior strained his eyes, trying to see the next three minutes of probable events.

 _Hellfire_.

Every important structure of the facility was about to be hit by multiple, laser-guided rockets coming from below the mountains, just out of sight – probably from ground based missile vehicles. The explosive’s blast radius was so enormous, they could have been nuclear for all Junior knew. Concrete would melt. They were too far for Aron to get there in time, even flying through Twi. And obviously the Shadow knew exactly where to aim.

The leader relayed the information through the link and added “Most cameras go dark after the impact but not all. Let’s see… the ones around the mountains, the one at the entrance, _the bunkers_ – thank goodness. They’re safe for now.”

Baekho turned in a circle. “There are no cameras in this panic room,” he sent. “Are we safe in here?”

“No,” Junior said out loud. “I still can’t see past the impact. If I stay here, I die.”

Ren grabbed him by the collar and pulled. “Then what are we waiting for?”

They rushed down the stairs onto the platform and further down into the belly of the mountain where tons of granite and layers of reinforced titanium plating shielded them for anything going on outside.

Jason confirmed that everybody from the staff was present – as far as a headcount was possible within thirty seconds – and entered his own pin to shut the bunker gate. Junior saw his assistant switch the power supply to the backup generator within the underground complex.

Junior’s future-sight returned.

For a moment he breathed easy, but the future was still truncated forty minutes from now.

“There is a thirty percent chance the enemy can cut through the bunker in ten minutes. Sixty percent that they’ll make it in twenty minutes. After forty, it’s a certainty. And then they’ll throw everything they have at us.”

Wang called her men over. There was an arsenal in the underground facility, where they went to arm themselves. Meanwhile Lin had finished a proper headcount and was ready for the next step.

“Secret evacuation,” Junior said. “The bunker has a connection to the outside. I’m the only one who knows about it and it’s not written down anywhere. I made sure when we built this place. But it’s a tiny, dark tunnel. You will have to crawl for a good mile without stopping. It leads to a path along the mountain. The entrance is behind cover plate nineteen-G in the left corridor.”

Lin nodded and began collecting the non-combatants for their lengthy evacuation while Wang and her men armed themselves. Only Jason didn't move from his spot.

Should they all run away, too? Aron could create a much bigger tunnel and Ren could illuminate it easily. But what if the Shadow had troops on the other side of the mountain. The villain would follow the anywhere. They had to fight. They had to stay.

This left six boy with nothing to do. Then the impact hit.

It was a minor earthquake. The sound of the explosions didn’t travel through the rock but the subsequent noise of collapsing architecture did. The lights flickered as power lines rattled along their mountings.

Junior turned to his friends. “I don’t have a battle plan yet. We can’t stay here and wait until they find a way in. We have to go out soon and figure out how to fight them. Wang’s troop will engage individual agents. Depending on what I see we can engage or make flight a priority. The question is where we could flee? Would the Shadow attack the city if we hide there?”

All mercenaries were armed and geared up. The first civilians crawled into the small escape hatch to the tunnel, wearing headlamps.

Then Junior saw something in the future he couldn’t believe. Of course, it being part of the Shadow’s plan gave him only a few seconds of warning – and no idea how to avoid it.

Baekho _flickered_.

“What?” The white tiger looked down on himself. He faded in and out of Twi involuntarily. “I’m not- [flicker] I’m not doing any- [flicker] I don’t know how to stop th- [flicker] help!”

“I’m losing the connection,” Minhyun sent.

“It’s like the time [flicker] when I couldn’t go into Tw- [flicker] but the other way. I can’t stay in reali- [flicker]”

The fading became more erratic until it was impossible to understand a word the boy said. Then he was gone – trapped in Twi. They had lost Baekho. Junior saw no probability for him to pop anywhere.

Jason produced a tablet from somewhere and showed the only available feed to the leader. The camera looking at the entrance showed enough of the surrounding to give an impression of the damage.

Nothing was still standing. Everything was still on fire. Even the rock was burning – the Shadow had used napalm.

Junior had thought he had time to plan. He had thought the Shadow was a cunning, stealthy Machiavelli-wannabe. He had thought the Shadow was running out of resources. He had underestimated how far the enemy’s plans had gotten before the flatline incident cornered the villain and forced this course of action.

Junior had been arrogant and lazy and if there had been time he would have beaten himself up over it. But now, he had to be a leader.

“Chief Wang,” he shouted, his eyes on the screen. “Five agents of the void are about to enter the base in fifty seconds. It has just become a certainty. Take them out before they know where the bullets are coming from.”

All remaining soldiers – about two dozen – assembled at the gate which Jason opened for them. Wang led them outside, wearing a headset. Junior put on his own to act as predictive coordinator. Of course the technology was only a backup plan.

“Minhyun, can you keep all our guys in a link net?”

“Yes, leader. You can just think your commands at them.”

Junior observed the future action of the enemy troops and told his soldiers through which burning wreckage to run in order to flank the agents of the void most effectively.

A small shift in the future occurred as the chance of an event jumped from nothing to certain. Ren rubbed his temples, dropped out the link net and collapsed. Junior had gotten a single precious second of warning and caught his boyfriend before Ren’s head hit the ground. Then the shaking began – the empath was having a seizure.

Minhyun’s network broke.

“I’ll try to connect to him,” the dream-walker said. “I can still get into his mind. He’s getting jammed. There’s no reason why but his brain is doing a hundred things at once. Have you seen this coming?”

“No,” Junior said.

“Then I think the Shadow can induce epilepsy from afar. I’ll try to reach Ren in there. Maybe I can fight whatever is causing th-”

Minhyun staggered. Junior knew what was about to happen before it did. The dream-walker collapsed onto the ground with a seizure. Two more down. It was him, Jason and the American now.

Aron knelt down next to his boyfriend. “Is this going to happen to us, too?”

“I don’t…” Probabilities shifted and all Junior saw a few seconds from now were senseless, flashing half-images. “Yes, it’s happening right now!”

The future went black.


	55. Prince of Tomorrow (3)

_[There is a tiny paragraph of graphic gore after ‘do your worst’ and another one beginning with ‘Junior fell backwards’.]_

 

A thin grid of metal shot from the ground and formed a dome above the group.

Immediately – even before it was fully shaped – Junior’s future reestablished. No incapacitating stroke, no darkness. There was still the vague forty minute limit in which they had to either fight or flee, but somehow he was still alive.

It took him a moment to figure out what had happened. He was fully surrounded by a thin metal grid on all sides, merged with the ground underneath. Obviously, Aron had made it. Was that…

“A Faraday cage?”

“Yeah.” The American smiled, making him look nefarious in the sharp emergency lighting falling through the grate. “So it worked, huh?”

“Guess so, the cage blocks all electromagnetic radiation. Seems whatever causes these seizures isn’t magic at least.”

Ren and Minhyun were unchanged, spasming occasionally, but otherwise in deep slumber. He saw no chance for them to wake up anytime soon.

Unfortunately the tablet also required to be connected to the outside via electronic signal. The footage from the security camera was cut off. The headset was similarly useless. Chief Wang and her men were engaging the enemy with no superpowered knowledge to guide their tactics, possibly assuming Junior had been killed by unknown means.

At least the civilians were all gone by now, forming a massive line through the tunnel and hopefully making it out the other end unscathed.

Seconds of inactivity felt like an eternity.

“I need to help,” Junior said. “Make a hole.”

Aron looked up from his position on the ground where he held his unconscious boyfriend. “I’m not letting you out. Unless I go with you. And even then I-“

“I don’t want out. I just need a hole for the tablet.”

“Oh.”

A thin slit in the grate appeared. Just enough room for Jason to hold his arm out. The tablet took a nerve wrecking amount of time to reconnect. At long last the camera’s stream became visible and Jason adjusted the view angle.

Wang’s troop was doing well, pushing the attackers back through the narrow space between the ruins of tract B and C. Details were impossible to make out across the distance but the losses seemed to have been minimal. However-

“They’re being ambushed,” Junior said. “As soon as they’re on open ground, they will be hit by a missile. The vehicles carrying them moved closer.”

He poked the headset. No sound. Even when he held it out of the cage it refused to reconnect.

The leader folded the device and shoved it angrily in his pocket. “Were going out. Aron, when I say ‘Faraday’ you make a new cage. Stay close to me. We have to get to Wang. Jason, stay here in case Ren or Minhyun wake up. Or in case Baekho reappears, but I have no hope for that. If we two aren’t back in ten minutes you put the unconscious ones somewhere safe and escape through the tunnel yourself.”

He didn’t even wait for an answer, he simply waved Aron to speed up.

The cage burst open and the remaining superpower duo walked up to the bunker’s gate.

 

***

 

The outside was _still_ burning. The sky had darkened with black smoke. Every single building lay in ruins. It was difficult to even find a path towards an area that would let them walk unobstructed.

“Do you think,” Aron said, “we’ll be seen by drones? We’d be too slow if we walk carefully and too obvious if I blow everything out of our way. I should tunnel us.”

Junior nodded and fell as the earth sank beneath him. Aron vaporized the rock ahead while telling the surrounding air to stay cool. Plasma burned away the granite brightly. The boys walked in a straight line underground with Junior counting the steps until they had to reemerge.

Aron even turned the earth into proper stairs when they arrived. Their new position was inside the four roofless exterior walls of Block F. Putting out the surrounding fires with a thought, Aron cleared the path ahead of debris.

From the shattered window they had a passable view across the terrain in front of the facility. The missile vehicles had indeed moved a lot closer. There were four of them. Only one had ammunition left as far as they could see.

“It will fire in one minute thirty seconds. Eighty percent chance.”

“No, it won’t,” Aron said, with a sneer. One flick of his wrist and the remaining rockets detonated simultaneously, loudly turning the truck into a rising fireball. Another flick. The outer cars of the unarmed trio smashed into the one between them with enough force to mend them together into a mangled cluster of car parts.

The wall ahead crumbled following Aron’s command and the boys made their way out into the open, towards the fighting soldiers.

“Over there,” Junior said, pointing at the horizon behind the facility. “Two enemy helicopters rising over the second mountaintop from the right. Ninety-five percent chance. Will fire at our guys.”

The moment the aircrafts became visible, Aron incinerated them.

“It’s clear that the Shadow banked on having us unconscious,” the American said. “I’m beginning to think this won’t be so bad. He’s truly short on resources. We can whittle down his tiny army in an hour or so. What do I explode next?”

“The agents,” Junior said. “Now that no missiles will be coming I suspect they stopped retreating and will engage in earnest.”

The precog led his team member along the broken road between buildings until they met the agents of the void from behind their lines.

The Shadow’s agents and the organization’s operatives had used the burning rubble for an impromptu trench war, laying siege to each other’s lines.

Nineteen men. More agents weren’t left. The Shadow had not found the time to recruit new ones and rush them through the indoctrination and mind control process. These guys were goons and mercenaries that had long been turned into cultist who would violently defend everything the Shadow held dear. Junior knew this because his senses told him so. Finally, a useful piece of information again. And great news, too.

“Those are all of them. There are no others left. Aron, do your worst.”

Nineteen blood fountains erupted out of combat uniforms. Brain matter splattered upon the barricades and ammunition crates. Red mush oozed from the clothes that dropped to the ground. The agents of the void were no more.

 

***

 

The duo reunited with Wang’s troop. Junior’s predictions had been correct. They had barely lost any men, since the agents of the void had only tried to lure them into the open.

Nothing in the immediate future was too concerning. Naturally, the ruckus on the mountain had attracted attention and sooner or later somebody would come by to inquire, but for the moment they were safe.

Turning a lone steel beam into chocolate helped the troops to gain a morale boost. As if the mere arrival of Aron the Powerful wouldn’t have been enough. The atmosphere was oddly celebratory.

Meanwhile the chief and Junior tried to plan further steps.

First, they managed to reconnect the headset. Jason reported no change in the unconscious boys' conditions. Next, they made sure every soldier who needed first aid got it. Then it was time to think of a way to escape without attracting attention.

Just as they discussed the merits of splitting up, the future shifted in a major way.

It was only a small armored vehicle pulling into the facility's perimeter. One person was inside. A person Junior had never met personally, but knew intimately. As soon as the man came into reach, the boy was flooded with random information.

The man used many aliases. But one name stood out.

“The Shadow!” Junior yelled. “He’s here. He has some kind of weap-“

An enormous beam hit the lose cluster of resting people. Aron couldn’t react in time and a handful of soldiers were disintegrated by unimaginable heat. Anyone standing too close to the beam suffered severe burns, including Wang.

Finally, Aron managed to block the unceasing fire.

A figure emerged from the truck. It was too far away to make out details but one thing was unmistakable. The Shadow was carrying an eldritch device – no, he was _merged_ with it. The disturbing tentacles and antennae running over the dirty white-ish construction gave him an inhuman, asymmetrical appearance. All features were obscured by the eldritch-suit.

He took to the air. He flew at insane speed, approaching their location but not descending.

Junior heard his companion whisper “So unfair.”

“Listen Aron, you have to keep him away from the bunker. I can’t see what he’s going to do. Maybe it’s the device. Maybe he has a random number generator integrated into the suit. We have to keep him away from Ren and-”

The Shadow had come close enough to grab a huge pipe sticking out of a roof’s remains. He pulled it from its mounting and threw it at the boys. Aron reacted in time, turning it to dust. Then he countered with plasma. It showed no effect.

“I think he’s wearing the shield I can’t penetrate or an even more upgraded version. I’d have to get much closer to him to-“

More debris came their way. Aron did his best but some made it to the ground and broke the asphalt. Junior tumbled. Dust was everywhere. He had no idea if he was in Aron’s protective range. He took a step into the other boy’s direction and the ground shook.

Junior fell backwards. The moment he lost control of his stance he already knew what was going to happen. He landed on a thin pole, burying it in his head. Right away he lost all feeling below the neck. Either his spine was severed or his skull was cracked. He couldn’t tell. If the blood was any indication the pole had made it out the other end, going through the whole brain.

Every future truncated.

And so did the present.


	56. Prince of Tomorrow (4)

“This has transpired most dreadfully,” Lady Luck said. “But we shall make the best of it.”

“…Am I dead?”

Junior stood before the glowing woman, in the darkness of her inestimably sized throne room. His head wound was gone, but he was after all just an avatar of himself. The boy felt colder than he had the previous times in this place.

Lady Luck made a wide gesture. “You are here. What becomes of your physical form is for us to decide.”

“I have options? Wait, is Aron fighting the Shadow on his own right now?”

“Time is of no concern here,” the bright being said. “I fear the Shadow’s activities have widened the rift. It may even become possible for the Void to enter your universe in short order. While my kind cannot deter them long and can ourselves not enter this Ring fully, it is nonetheless easier now to transfer energy as the rift can be used as long as our kind does not concede all ground to the Void.”

“You can send energy? …Meaning?”

She bowed slightly. “My aid will be twofold. First, Junior, receive this insight we only just learned of: The Void technology is meant to help your species in tearing the fabric of your reality apart and allow their creators entrance . But it would be of no use if humankind was to destroy itself before this had occurred. I would have liked to see all Void technology banished from your realm, but we have discovered an additional option.”

“There’s a safety feature, isn’t there?” Junior said, as he realized the Void would not have dropped off super-tech if they didn’t have an off-switch. After the invasion, the occupiers would not want humans to keep their toys.

“I see you understand,” Lady Luck said. “Better yet, every device can be reconfigured to act in this manner – for every other device.”

Junior gasped, even though his avatar didn’t have to breathe in whatever abstract place they were. _A universal kill-switch_ in every single eldritch thing. Through his super powered senses, he was fed schematics of Lady Luck’s species’ research. If only he would be able to touch the Shadow’s super-suit in the right places he could turn off every Void device in the universe.

“Th-thank you,” he said, recovering from the avalanche of technical knowledge. “And…you said you will help in two ways.”

“Correct,” Lady Luck answered. “The energy of which I spoke. It is how I imbued you and your companions. You must act as my agent. Truthfully, you were always supposed to be – if it came to pass – the prince of your kind’s days to come.” She opened her arms and her golden glow spread from her immediate area outward, illuminating the emptiness, making Junior feel comfortably warm.

She continued. “A prince. Not a King, holder of absolute power. Not a mere Sage, advising others only. Should you accept the burden of ‘noblesse oblige’ I will allow you to return. I was careful in my selection as much as the circumstances allowed when I imbued you. Can I trust you, Junior, not to misuse my gift? Will you usurp or guide – conquer or shepherd?”

Should he just answer the obvious thing? How would she tell if he said the truth? It wasn’t as if she had much of a choice. Then what did she mean? Unless, it was not a test. Perhaps it was a true choice.

The boy licked his dry lips. “I- I will make sure to do what gives us another day – whatever it may be. And if – no, _when_ – tomorrow becomes today, I’ll do it all over again.”

Still the light grew brighter. “This will be difficult to comprehend,” she said. “It will be, I suppose, similar to what you refer to as ‘overdrive’.” The light became unbearable to look at. “Farewell, Junior. I have given you all I can.”

Even with eyes closed, it felt like looking at the sun.

“And…Junior,” she said cheerfully, “I wish you _luck_.”

 

***

 

The brightness didn’t cease upon his return, but now it was Junior who radiated.

It was the same light Minhyun produced when he healed injuries, only with ten times the intensity. Junior pushed himself off the pole stuck through his head and was immediately restored.

Some time had passed. Aron on the ground and the Shadow in the air had moved through the burning ruins of the base, exchanging debris in a senseless battle of attrition. Even if the enemy had noticed the light, there was no way to react without giving Aron an opening.

For some reason the layers of the realm of possibility were much thicker – no, more numerous.

Junior could predict events with a probability of below one percent. He was able to see the Shadow’s actions ahead of time as easily as if he the villain’s moves were pre-determined.

The overdriven-precog linked with Aron. It surprised himself that he could link now, but he had simply reached out with his mind, intending to shout and it had happened.

“Minhyun?” Aron sent.

“Guess again.”

“ _You’re alive_!” The American almost forgot to vaporize the incoming steel beam.

“Listen closely, this is going to be a bit much at once. Met Lady Luck. Got more juice. Learned how to win.”

“How?” Aron sent, pulled a truck sized piece of mountain from the ground directly under the Shadow and made it shoot upward.

“Every eldritch device has a kill-switch. It can even turn off other devices. If I can get to his super-suit we can beat him.” Junior was running from cover to cover, closing in on the battle. His radiance had lowered to a level that didn't hurt to look at anymore.

“Why not get to a different one?” Aron sent.

“They’re too far away. We- oh! Never mind, my random information sense just told me there’s one around. The one that keeps Baekho locked out of reality. It’s not part of the suit.”

“Go get it.”

“No,” Junior spoke out loud. “You go. The Shadow is mine.”

Stepping confidently into the open, the precog stared upward with a grim expression. His sudden appearance had made the Shadow stop throwing pipes and rocks. Aron had also stopped.

“It’s not too far,” Junior said, “but you have to find a vehicle. Don’t worry, I’ll hold my own.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“But,” Aron hesitated, looking back and forth between friend and foe, “how do I get there? I can’t drive the military trucks if any are left.”

“ _Hello_?” a voice came from Junior’s pocket.

The boy pulled the headset out and held it up to his ear. “Jason?”

“Yes,” the assistant said. “I can bring Aron wherever he needs to go. Did I hear that right? And, by the way, congratulations on being alive. However you did that.”

“Thanks.”

Junior relayed the plan to Aron and just when the Shadow was about to begin his assault again, the boy pushed himself off the ground and ascended into the sky.

“So unfair,” Aron sent before the link ended.

Junior looked down. Being as high us as an apartment building's roof was pretty scary, superpower or not. The American stayed behind. One nod and Aron vanished into the ground, tunneling his way back to the bunker.

After reaching the villain’s height, Junior linked with his nemesis. “Ready to finish this?”

The Shadow flinched at the intrusion into his mind, to Junior’s great satisfaction. With them at the same level the boy was able to see the nooks and crannies of the super-suit with all its disgusting pseudo-organic outgrowths, which obscured the shape of the fully covered body.

“So you can fly now,” the Shadow sent slowly. If that was his best response, the usually eloquent man had to be taken by surprise like never before. Junior grinned maliciously and closed the distance between them so the villain would be able to see the boy’s face.

“Fly, heal, link. Oh and I learned something even better than all this. Wanna see?”

The Shadow raised his arm – the one carrying the heat beam device that was integrated into the suit. He shot one ray at Junior who evaded easily, by slipping behind the man. The Shadow turned around and readjusted, bringing distance between himself and the boy. He held his arm out as if about to fire. Nothing happened.

“W-what have you done?”

Junior chuckled. “Luck. I can see every possible timeline – _and pick one_.”

“What!”

“There was a chance of a component critically overheating and breaking your toy. Zero point zero one percent. More than enough for me.”

The probability-influence he could exert over reality did not extend to Void-technology directly, but at least he had taken the enemies strongest weapon. Getting close enough to flip the switch was definitely possible now.

Junior’s pocket hissed with static. “Can you hear me,” Jason’s voice came from the headset.

“Hold on a second, Shadow-boxer.” Junior terminated the link and established one to Aron and the assistant.

“Where do we go,” Aron sent immediately.

“Have you left the area yet?” Junior asked.

“No, we need to know if you can distract the guy with no fashion sense so he doesn’t shoot us down.”

Junior evaded a wall coming at him – the Shadow had dropped down to use the surrounding as projectiles.

“Shoot you down? Isn’t Jason driving you?”

“Nope,” Jason sent, “We’re going by helicopter. There’s one parked at the other side of the mountain. Aron tunneled us there.”

Junior evaded a shredded generator. “You can pilot?”

“Sure,” Jason sent.

“Fine, uh… Go east and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Understood, boss.”

“Hey,” Aron sent, “You’re okay out there?”

Junior wished his grin could be transferred over the link. “Couldn’t be better. The Shadow is having the worst day of his life.”

The cat and mouse game continued for a while. Even though Junior was the mouse, he was the one playing with the cat. As the Shadow threw pieces of rock and tried to hit the boy from far or near, the attacks became less and less focused as the villain tried to find another angle to approach his desperate situation.

Meanwhile, Junior poked the man’s mind every now and then to taunt him and break the link just when the villain found a retort.

Over the next few minutes Junior found opportunities to make every non-Void device on the Shadow’s body fail – down to the wrist watch. It turned out the suit didn’t do more than keep a force field around its owner and allowed for the power of flight. Even basic navigation must have been handled by a separate apparatus like a gyroscope, since the Shadow had trouble staying in a straight position after all his toys had failed.

Clearly the suit was a masterpiece of inter-universe engineering and might have held useful knowledge, but the option for pleasant exchanges was long gone.

Aron arrived at the location where Baekho’s trap was hidden. The duo landed and entered the short cave. There were no agents of the void left to guard it.

As soon as Junior got their report over link, the Shadow disengaged and rushed towards the hiding place at unprecedented swiftness.

“He’s coming your way,” Junior sent. “He must have figured out you’re there. I’m not fast enough to follow. I think he might be near the speed of sound. Can you get through before he’s at your location? I can tell you what to do.”

Aron took a moment before sending back. “Um, this thing has a force field, too.”


	57. Prince of Tomorrow (5)

While Junior did his best to catch up with the battle, he knew he’d be too late. He didn’t waste time to rise higher than necessary, so it wasn’t possible for him to see past the mountain he had to cross.

The boys exchanged their Intel. Aron would create a tunnel in the cave for Jason to hide safely. It was too late to escape via helicopter. The eldritch device was too big to move and resisted Aron’s powers.

In the plus side, the Shadow had no weapons other than the super strength instilled by his suit.

After a minute of flying at top speed, the hiding place came into sight. Since the boy had seen the place in his vision of the area when his random sense had shown it to him, he knew that things were not as they should be. Despite that, at first he was convinced his memory was failing him. Junior could hardly believe what he saw.

Aron had _moved a mountain_.

One. Hundred. Billion. Tons.

“Why did you do that?” the precog sent.

Aron chuckled – so chuckling _did_ transport through the link. “Guess who’s under there?”

“You buried the Shadow?”

“He didn’t see it coming. With no heat ray he can’t burn himself through the rock like he’d be able to do before. He’ll claw himself free eventually, though. Honestly, the most impressive part is that I managed to avoid a major earthquake.”

 

***

 

It was as ugly as every other eldritch object.

The alien machine was crammed into the cave that hadn’t been spacious to begin with. Perhaps the Shadow’s attack had been less organized than it seemed. To think it could have been successful…

“Any ideas?” Aron said. He stood at the entrance, keeping an eye on ‘his’ mountain and waiting until it failed to be the prison he had turned it into.

Jason was leaning against the cave wall. “It’s heavy. It must have taken some effort to bring here.”

“Good thinking,” Junior said. “Why would they carry it into the mountains and drop it in here if they could have left it somewhere else? Answer: it needs to be close enough to work. If we can attach it to the helicopter we might be able to haul it out of range and free Baekho this way. Are there any cables on board of-”

Something slithered across Junior’s consciousness. _Another link_.

The precog reached out and pulled the fleeting mental tentacle into his network. There was a feedback loop as the networks joined, vibrating his skull uncomfortably. As the ringing in his ears subsided he was met with Minhyun’s disembodied voice.

“Junior? Is that your link? How?”

“It’s a long story. Are you okay? Is Ren awake, too?”

“I’m here,” the empath sent. “We woke up a minute or so ago. Where is everybody?”

Junior sped through the latest events – sparing them the gruesome details of how he had found his way into Lady Luck’s chamber again – and finished with the displaced mountain. “I know the Shadow is still there because I can sense his mind. I could link with him but why should I?”

“Wait a second,” Minhyun sent. “It would be too difficult to get to you in time but with a network of two link-sources I think… Would the force field block something immaterial, too?”

“What do you…” Junior was struck by the same revelation as the dream-walker. “Ren, can you do it?”

“Never tried across this massive distance, but it’s the source that needs to be close. The Conmote itself, not sure about that.”

The plan was for Minhyun to break the link, which would be kept up by Junior. Ren would turn Minhyun’s emotion into a Conmote at Junior’s position. It was made from focus, created by Minhyun’s meditation. Minutes later their attempts finally succeeded.

Soft yellow, barely opaque and hip high – the Conmote was wimpy, but it had steady hands.

Junior directed Ren on how to move Focus. It passed through the barrier and was able to touch the device. They had won.

“Open the hatch on top of the leftmost blob,” Junior sent. “Good, now push all those pipe things aside so you can get to the green glowing cylinder. Pull it- No, wait, screw it clockwise. Now pull.”

More minutes passed while Focus made its way deeper into the belly of the alien machine. In the end, the Conmote was nearly buried to the ankles inside the metallic and fleshy protrusions. Junior knelt on the ground, trying to see what was ahead of Focus’s path.

“We made it,” he sent. “Huh, it’s literally a switch. That wasn’t obvious from the schematics. Anyway, the moment you flip it, the circuit will be interrupted and Baekho should come back to us.”

Ren jumped in. “The landscape has changed from the battle. If he’s outside in Twi as it was when he vanished and he reappears in reality as it is now-“

“He could end up inside a wall or something,” Junior sent, finishing the ugly thought. “But now that we can turn it off at any time I should be able to tell where he would pop at any given moment. I’d just have to be there… Or not. I might be able to see through Minhyun if he acts as a second network source.”

“And how am I supposed to keep Focus up?” Ren send back. “Tell Minhyun to go into meditation again after finding Baekho? That could take a while. It’s a miracle he’s holding up so well.”

Junior pondered their options. “Wang should still be around, if she survived. Some of her men, too. Open the gate and go look. I’ll link with Minhyun in the meantime.”

 

***

 

Due to the dream-walker’s exhaustion it took surprisingly long. Eventually, Junior combined his link web with Minhyun’s and they let their immaterial tendrils flutter along the ruins of the base, in hopes that Baekho hadn’t wandered off completely.

In the meantime Ren had found the remainder of their forces. Wang was alive but unable to stay conscious for more than a few seconds at a time. Her injuries were severe. A mostly functional truck was used to transport her and the other hurt soldiers to the city with only two men staying behind.

Ren’s empathy seeped through the link and a tiny, jittery Conmote of apprehension formed next to the eldritch device.

As Junior readied himself to give the command he searched for the missing boy’s probable point of return.

“Found him. He’s flying over the- No wait, he’s standing on the roof of tract G. It still _had_ a roof when this Twi was created.”

“We can’t risk it then,” Minhyun sent.

The leader considered the case. “Even if he pops back automatically, he should have time to shift again and land properly. Deactivating the machine doesn’t disturb his ability. Actually, it might even take a while for him to realize he can come back.”

They agreed on bringing about the white tiger’s swift return.

“Alright,” Junior sent to his boyfriend, “flip the switch.”

With wobbly steps the ugly Conmote crawled into the device and did as commanded. Right away the alien object reacted with sizzling. Various outgrowths hissed as if they were letting off steam but nothing was ejected.

“Baekho!” Minhyun and Junior yelled into the link at the same time the second their network was able to incorporate the boy. As expected he shifted again to fly down gently instead of crashing to his death. As he was finally fully returned, they directed him back to the bunker. On the way there he was briefed on the situation.

“There’s one thing left to do,” Junior told everybody. “We can reconfigure the device to act as kill switch for all Void tech. Ren, are you up to the task?”

“Sure. Tell me what screws to turn.”

“First, get back into the- On no, this is bad. Eighty-seven-point-four-three percent chance the Shadow digs himself free in a few seconds. Ninety-one-point-four now. Okay Aron, you need to take care of him. I’ll assist.”

The leader positioned himself where he could see what Apprehension was doing to the machine and simultaneously look outside to warn the American of incoming attacks.

A sound like fireworks echoed from the surrounding mountains as the Shadow burst forth from the rock. Junior would have liked to link with him even if just to distract him, but the boy had his hands – or mind – full at the moment.

It turned out Aron didn’t even need help to vaporize every incoming projectile. The attacks were slow and small. Even the Shadow did not have infinite stamina.

Then they ceased entirely. The deformed shape of the villain simply hovered high above the cave entrance.

“What’s he planning,” Junior mumbled. “Is he fiddling with his suit? I think he is. But what can he do?”

The device in the cave made noises. Then the Shadow flew away at top speed.

“What did he do?” Aron asked.

Junior consulted his random information sense which seemed to supply amazingly useful information today and was rewarded with a reason to panic. “He’s crippled the device. I think he has activated a radius limit. Even if we turn it into a kill switch it would only affect the range it originally had to trap Baekho. He’s escaping.”

“We’ll see about that,” Baekho sent before dropping out of the network.

Ren kept following instructions from afar, Minhyun kept the link stable, Aron and Jason made the helicopter ready for launch. But all of it would not be enough.

Junior could tell with certainty that the kill switch would be completed _after_ the Shadow had left its range. He pressed on anyway. There was still time to come up with something.

Luckily, the enemies’ trajectory led him close to the base, perhaps back to his first vehicle. Baekho popped directly on top of the fleeing Shadow and fell onto him. It must have taken several in-flight shifts to figure out the Shadow’s path and intercept it properly.

The leader observed everything through the network of Nuest’s minds. The muscled boy held on tight and dragged the villain into Twi. The suit failed inside the strange realm and both of them dropped down. But Junior knew the probabilities didn’t add up to victory.

Baekho couldn’t hold on for long since the Shadow’s punches were enough to free him from the grip even without super strength. It was trivial to predict all their moves but Junior couldn’t link with his friend inside Twi where most of the struggle took place.

It wouldn’t be enough.

Why couldn’t Junior influence the probability with which Void technology malfunctioned?

…Yeah, why couldn’t he? There should be a chance, after all, no matter how minor.

He looked _harder_. And harder and harder.

The timelines diverged at last. Zero point zero zero zero… it was too ‘small’ to see but it was there. He looked harder still. All links snapped from his mind. His nose began to bleed. A ringing in his ears drowned out Aron’s voice. His vision blurred. But his future-sight sharpened in turn.

He could do it.

The eldritch device switched into universal kill mode ahead of schedule and activated.

Junior turned his head to look outside. He could barely register shapes, but he saw all timelines with perfect clarity. In every one of them, the Shadow plummeted to his death from a mountain’s height.

As the enemy hit the granite at terminal velocity, Junior’s legs gave in. Falling into Aron’s arms the boy smiled weakly.

Victory.

 

***

 

“We did it,” Aron said, his voice sounding like he was underwater, his face blurry.

Somewhere on earth the Shadow’s last failsafe was activated by the expiration of the villain’s heartbeat.

All timelines truncated, heralding the end of humanity.

Junior lost consciousness.


	58. Healing Time - I

_Late morning, before missile impact._

_The bunker under the headquarters._

Ren was having a seizure. Minhyun’s network broke under the sudden stress.

“I’ll try to connect to him,” he said and quickly found the empath’s brain in uproar. “I can still get into his mind. He’s getting jammed. There’s no reason why but his brain is doing a hundred things at once. Have you seen this coming?”

“No,” Junior said.

“Then I think the Shadow can induce epilepsy from afar. I’ll try to reach Ren in there. Maybe I can fight whatever is causing th-”

There was pain but it didn’t register properly. He was falling but he couldn’t tell up from down. It was hard to think.

In a short moment of lucidity, Minhyun realized he was at the verge of having a seizure just like Ren. Was there any way he could help himself?

His mind was fractured, one incoherent sensation chasing the next. Maybe…he could link himself – recombining the pieces of his psyche into a one-person-network.

A dozen half links formed and collapsed into a recursive mess. Minhyun was linked to himself but every part wanted to be on top of the infinitely nested chain.

Coherent thoughts formed. But they were thoughts he had experienced before. His mind held onto the only things it had available – memories.

 

***

 

“Mister Johnson is busy,” the secretary said. “But you can leave a message.”

“Thanks,” Aron said sweetly, “I don’t think so.”

Minhyun hadn’t really been able to follow the quick English conversation. He had just stood in the background and admired the hyper-modern lobby.

The whole idea of traveling around the world to intimidate every director of the board personally had sounded like madness, but he had made a promise so they went down the checklist. And he got to see a lot of interesting places like New York, where they were now.

Aron led the trio away from the head desk and they went looking for a bathroom. It was a strange routine but it worked. They found a place where they couldn’t be seen, Baekho dragged them into Twi, they made their way into the boss’s office, popped into reality and let Aron do his thing.

This time it was quite a journey. Director Johnson lived way higher up than any of the others. Maybe New York wasn’t that great a place after all, with all those skyscrapers and what not.

They arrived in front of the boss’s door and popped. After Minhyun confirmed that nobody else was inside, Aron turned the mahogany gate to dust.

“Listen Scumbag,” the American yelled as he walked in on the shocked billionaire. “We‘re from the little organization that stuffs your pockets. You know, the one with the boy you exploited and abused. We have a few terms to dictate.”

Johnson pulled a phone and a gun from his desk. It took one flick of Aron’s wrist to make both items explode in the man’s hand.

“How impolite,” Aron said, shaking his head. “I’m still hoping one of your scumbags will be cooperative without a…demonstration. But if you insist.”

Then he raised his arm and the director lost the ground under his feet.

 

***

 

“Why? Would you rather I use _somebody else’s_ furniture?” Aron shouted down from the tower of twisted metal which reached almost to the sanatorium’s ceiling.

“No,” Minhyun shouted back up, “I don’t want you to do this at all. I don’t-“

Unwilling to keep yelling he linked them instead. “I don’t see why you do this at all. You should focus on recovering. Not breaking your bones. You did well in the skyscraper. Why do you need to practice something you already know?”

“Because,” Aron sent, pausing dramatically, “it hurt my butt that time. Now stand back.”

Minhyun sighed and took a few steps away from the diving tower the American had fashioned from the room’s furnishing.

Aron jumped, or rather fell, with his backside facing the ground. He called every loose piece of scrap to come flying under him. As he was halfway between platform and floor, he had enough trash in reach to transfigure it instantly into fluffy cotton.

He landed safely.

“See, you didn’t hurt your butt,” Minhyun said. “Can you stop now?”

The boy in the pile of fluff climbed down with weak limbs. “No. There are so many materials I still need to try. I must to find the optimal butt shield.”

“Please don’t fall and die. I’m going to bed.”

“Ooh, mattresses. I’ll try those next.”

 

***

 

It was a lazy afternoon.

There were things to do but the boys undoubtedly deserved one evening for themselves.

Minhyun’s head was on Aron’s shoulder. The boys watched TV in their bed, cuddling under the covers.

The shallow Korean soap opera was over and the news began. The main topic was still the Kaiju. Well, it was certainly something that allowed the journalists to do what they were best at – rampant, uninformed speculation. With the death toll the creature had it would take a while for interest to die down.

“At least the journos finally accept it’s real,” Aron said and stretched. “I think I’ve seen five different articles on how to fake this thing in Photoshop. It’s going to be the new moon landing.”

Minhyun leaded up and kissed the other boy’s cheek. “Do you think Baekho was right? Should we have stayed and forgone secrecy to help?”

For a while Aron looked straight ahead and said nothing. Eventually he inhaled slowly. “I can’t say. It seemed like we were making the right decision at the time. Depends on how bad the Shadow turns out to be. I just can’t imagine the general public rallying behind us in support.”

“I’ll always support you from behind.”

Aron rolled his eyes. “Wow, very funny.”

Letting his fingers run up Aron’s chest, Minhyun breathed down his boyfriend’s neck. “How about we support each other now?”

“Shush! Movie’s starting.”


	59. Question the Stars (1)

“He’s okay, he’s just not waking up,” Minhyun said. He had lost the connection to Junior but been able to reestablish quickly, finding the leader’s mind knocked out – incurably exhausted, at least for the moment.

There wasn’t much with which to console Ren who’d have to wait until Junior’s sleeping body was moved back to the ruins of their base.

“We should come up with something,” Minhyun said. “A place to go, I mean. We can’t stay here. Somebody’s bound to come up and have a look around after all those explosions and I don’t want to fight the police.”

Ren shook his head. “Only Junior knew what resources the organization still had. I don’t even have anyone’s phone numbers. If Lin made it out the other side of the mountain we’ll never see him again.”

“Its fine, he’ll wake up,” Minhyun said about the leader’s condition. “Maybe we can stay at a hotel or something? It would be difficult with him sleeping. Although…perhaps we have to visit the hospital. We could say he had a stroke or…”

The dream-walker realized that the other boy wasn’t paying attention. They were all exhausted, no doubt. But it was over. They had won. Once Aron and Jason came back they’d take on the next challenges one step at a time.

 

***

 

“Do listen, my child!” Lady Luck’s voice reverberated through his brain.

 

***

 

Minhyun found himself in the throne room, facing the glowing figure on her crystal seat.

“Fear not,” she said, “I have commanded you here, for you must hear of your ultimate purpose.”

“Woah,” Minhyun said. How had he even gotten to this place?

“The rift exposing your home world to the Void is too great to close from our side. You can receive a gift akin to what Junior obtained – and do what we cannot.”

“Slow down, Lady!” Minhyun couldn’t wrap his head around what was happening to him in the span of ten seconds. “It’s not over?”

“The Shadow,” she continued, “has fallen. And yet the gravest danger remains. The Void, which seeks only to enslave and plunder has used the Shadow’s doing to widen the rift. They can enter at great cost to themselves, but the riches of your universe will more than compensate for their efforts. If humankind is to remain free, I must bestow upon you as much energy as I can transfer. We will do what we can from our side, but know that your contribution is the obstacle which can truly be their downfall.”

Minhyun rubbed his temples. “Let me get this straight. You want to overcharge me like Junior – who is now unconscious by the way, thanks a lot – and you want me to battle the biggest baddies _in the multiverse_.”

“Correct.”

If it was true he had to do it, of course. Junior had believed her and taken the deal. He had to follow his leader’s example no matter the cost. He had to safe earth if he could. He had to safe Aron. Wait… _Aron_!

“Why am I here alone?” Minhyun asked. “Where are the others?”

For the first time there was more than just a small hint of emotion in her voice. Her regret was unmissable. “The only way we can help is by using the rift to transport energy to you. But the rift is guarded and defended by the Void. We cannot afford to fight them for access and so must use cunning. A narrow focus can pass undetected. It is enough only to imbue but one of you.”

“Why me?”

It had been a rash, instinctive question. He was almost…mad. How could they just put the weight of the world on his shoulders after all the hardship they had survived as a group?

Lady Luck descended from her throne.

She moved without touching the ground, carried by unseen forces.

The shining being illuminated the air ahead – dust specks or other imperfections refracting her emanation. She hovered with boundless grace into arm’s reach.

“When I first gained access to your world,” she said, “I was intrigued. I watched from afar, hoping to understand the greater whole. I am truly sorry I did not see earlier how your lives are meaningful all on their own. I was missing an understanding of what your kind calls ‘the human condition’.”

She raised her hand and held it as if about to stroke Minhyun’s cheek. Without touching him, she lowered it again.

“I have made so many mistakes,” she continued. “But you…you were not one of them. You were the first I imbued, years before the others. Your generosity, your kindness, your forbearance – of all the humans I have examined you alone I judged able to resist the corrupting temptation of power. Was it not for you, I would never have bothered seeking those you now call friends.”

Minhyun took deep breaths to fight down the lump in his throat.

“Alright,” he said weakly. “I’ll do it.”

Lady Luck nodded. “I will attempt to pour just enough energy into your psyche to give you what you need. There may come a point where you might have to choose if you will continue or surrender. Either’s choice’s consequences I wish you would not have to bare.”

“I want to protect. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Blinding light enveloped him. The woman’s voice became distorted as if reaching him from far away. “As you will it, my son.”

“Why do you call me your s-“

 

***

 

“A hospital is probably a good idea,” Ren said, “but I think all our papers burned to a crisp.”

He was back. Minhyun was in the bunker again and it seemed no time had passed.

It had not been a dream, he was sure of it. Was he already overcharged or had gained new powers? How could he test it?

Holding up his hand to signal Ren to wait, Minhyun attempted to link. His mind _linked_. And linked and linked and linked and linked-

The superlink extended into Baekho, the two present men, the far away rest of Nuest and – after a split second – also all of Jade-Lion-City in one fell swoop. Souls innumerable poured themselves into Minhyun’s brain like avalanches crashing down a funnel. His thoughts were momentarily suspended – drowned out by a million others. He couldn’t think anymore. But he _experienced_. All that his link-partners were, he experienced.

Although no conscious thought was possible, he understood. Like in Plato’s universal space back in the dreamscape he _knew_ the experiences of uncountable humans as if he had lived every one of them. Had this been Lady Luck’s approach to understand humankind? Was this how her species thought?

The superlink spread further, encompassing many millions more, integrating their experiences, their knowledge. Before long the first non-Chinese groups were added as Minhyun’s range jumped across borders. Vaguely he felt the unensouled lives of cattle, of wild animals, of sea creatures added to his network. His reach extended beyond the ocean, to other continents.

Then the filter kicked in and Minhyun regained the ability to tell other’s thoughts from his.

He realized he was screaming on top of his lungs and Ren stared at him with wide eyes. Of course the empath wasn’t able to tell exactly what had happened but he couldn’t have missed the stark change.

“It’s okay,” Minhyun said with a hoarse voice. “I just got an upgrade like Junior.”

“Is that why you’re glowing?” Ren asked and took a step back.

The superlinker looked down on himself and saw all his cells linked to his essence, their ever shifting nature and microscopic processes apparent to him effortlessly. He was shining like Lady Luck herself.

Then _matter began to speak_. The stone beneath his feet sang to him of the eons it had seen, the mountain around hummed with the might of epochs that lasted forever and had come to an end still. The air around his body swirled across his skin in patterns too complex to predict in the lifetime of the universe and yet so beautifully perfect as if immutably destined.

Minhyun wished to rise and the elements agreed. Gravity deferred to his decision.

Hovering high, watching the ceiling give way to clear his path obediently, he looked down at Ren.

“I’m sorry,” the reborn Prince said. “I have to go.”

Breaking every speed record, Minhyun accelerated out of the atmosphere and left earth behind. Space-time whispered of the terrible tear in its midst, just beyond the moon’s orbit, disgracing the glorious face of the solar systems changeless order.

The rift awaited.


	60. Question the Stars (2)

It was weird not to breathe but he hadn’t brought any oxygen with him into space and there was no point in making any. He was just fine.

The stars were so clear. Without the atmosphere in between they didn’t flicker. Millions of dots, sprinkled along a broad banner stretching all around. Accessing knowledge from humanity told him so many things at once.

His surrounding was barely above absolute zero. The sun’s light however hit him with enough radiation to wreck each one of his cells many times over. He told his own molecular structure to stop carcinogenesis and just like that everything was fine. The only sound he heard was his own blood pumping since nothing reached his ears in total vacuum.

Minhyun left through the Van Allen radiation belt and sped up further. It had been broad daylight when he left. The sun was up ahead, blinding him.

The boy changed course and flew around the earth from higher up than any satellite. The moon came into view over the horizon. He accelerated further – to one percent the speed of light. It took him less than two minutes to pass the moon. Seeing the white sphere in its three dimensional glory was a vastly different experience than looking at it from afar on the surface of a planet. It seemed so much more _real_.

Then he was further away from earth – from home – than any human had ever been. Nobody in history had been as lonely as Minhyun.

 

***

 

There were machines.

Ugly like the eldritch devices but the size of oil tankers. The vaguely cylindrical and conical shaped un-things pressed onward through some ragged line gleaming with harsh light – the rift.

The invasion force amounted to a dozen ships – assuming those were mere space ships and not far more ominous technology.

Around each fluttered a swarm of ghouls in a lose cluster, their flimsy, shimmering non-bodies moving chaotically across and between ships.

Whatever they were made of, their matter did not sing for Minhyun. They were aliens not only to humans but to the universe itself. And they were only the Void’s vanguard.

Beyond the armada – deep inside the rift – was a presence lying in wait. So strong, so malicious, Minhyun filtered through all the worlds languages and yet found no description. They were a _drain_ – everything they touched wilted. Onward they pressed, to ever more Rings in the Hierarchy. There was no coexistence with the Void.

He had the element of surprise. He had one free move. After that the battle could turn. How to use his advantage?

The supercharged dream-walker consulted the collective knowledge of mankind, filtering through state of the art research on the nature of matter and the tactical understanding of every war ever waged.

Then he tried everything at once.

 

***

 

The reigning Prince of Luck took all thermal energy at his disposal. The ship furthest ahead experienced fifteen million kelvin – the temperature inside the sun. Back on earth the light from the explosion would greatly outshine everything else in the sky.

Through all the light it was impossible to perceive what the ships were doing but Minhyun recalled their exact locations.

Ship number two was hit by lasers – non-thermal radiation energy – at unprecedented concentration. Ten bundles of photons near the breaking point of excitement danced along the distorted hull. Those were as many as Minhyun could make.

Within the same microsecond he focused all gravitational energy he could muster and sent it towards the nearest ship. Warp ripples traveled at light speed and hit the construction with tidal forces that would have torn a planet asunder.

Next was ship number four which had just fully exited the rift. Minhyun wrapped it into a bubble of temporal energy, concentrating the flow of time within the eldritch invasion vehicle. Inside the bubble, millennia passed within the blink of an eye.

Atomic energy he hadn’t used yet. And he had a lot of it at his disposal. Courageously, he split it among ships five and six which, out of all of them, were closest to each other. Nuclear detonations to rival the death of a star went off in between them. The radiation was so plentiful and so deadly, Minhyun had to redirect it away from his home world or risk damaging the atmosphere.

His last trick was matter itself. He inverted the polarity of any particle in the vicinity, creating uncontrollably high amounts of antimatter. The moment any of these particles met a hull they set of a small detonation that should tear apart and eat through all they touched.

The battle’s first microsecond passed. The light subsided. The silent explosions dimmed. He could see again.

All ghouls were gone. The ships were unharmed. Minimal damage was visible along their hulls, some burned and some charred, some oozing and some forming blisters. But they had not been destroyed.

It wasn’t enough.

Then the ghouls rose from the ships anew. They had not been destroyed either, merely scared off. Minhyun had no way to fight them all at once.

 

***

 

It was a complicated process. At first he considered cloning but it was clearly simpler to duplicate himself with a mixture of molecular level scanning and multiple simultaneous reconstructions from template matter teleported in from earth biospheres. Yeah, simple.

Ninety-nine new Minhyun’s opened their eyes for the first time.

The boy-swarm took course to intercept the ghoul swarm rushing his – or their – way.

Since Minhyun was able to enter Twi in his current supercharged state he only had to let a ghoul possess himself, or rather one of his selves, and then other Minhyuns could drag the possessed one into Twi. It would be a war of attrition but he intended to waste no time getting started.

A few people on earth dropped from his link. Then some more. It was difficult to keep the terrestrial net going while linking with several versions of himself out in space. He didn’t strictly _need_ a whole continent in his web of minds but it was disconcerting that he was already stretching beyond his intrinsic limits.

Then Minhyuns dropped from the net. The ships had opened fire. Two boys went down in a ragged ray of red, zig-zagging through space at light speed. Two more. Four more. Other ships joined in until it was impossible to act on the ghouls without opening up to attack.

Minhyun – the original one – sped out of the cross fire and dismissed all copies. He couldn’t fight the ghouls and he couldn’t fight the ships. He had to delay them until _somebody_ come up with _something_.

There was a change in one of the space crafts. Some contortion in its force field that the boy couldn’t interpret. It had been going on for a while and now as he was out of immediate danger he had the time to notice that it was only one ship showing this behavior.

Space swelled and dilated, rose and fell.

Ship number one warped past him and jumped to earth. Its speed would let it close the distance within a minute. There wasn’t enough time to engage it. Only one thing stood between the Void transporter and humanity’s home.

Minhyun bent space with all he could and redirected the warp field’s trajectory onto the moon.

Soundlessly, the vessel impacted on the dark side of the gray celestial body. The enormous space ship was utterly dwarfed by seventy-three quintillion metric tons of rock and ore.

Tears and cracks sprang up from the crash site and extended outward more and more. From the distance they barely looked noteworthy though Minhyun knew the crater had to be the size of a city. With their local source so suddenly devastated, the ship's ghoul swarm faded.

 _It had worked_.

The ship was badly damaged, broken in half, squished at the front. Its hull was almost peeling itself off the interior structure.

Behind Minhyun all ships went to warp at once. He had enough energy to stop one of them. Ten of originally twelve invasion transporters would make it to earth.

He needed more power.

The boy sent into his network. “Lady Luck, are you there?”


	61. Question the Stars (3)

He was back in the throne room.

This time however he was able to see its true form – and _hers_.

The place had more than three dimensions and was brimming with intangible lines, flowing through the room in soft slopes, carrying what could have been anything from liquid to current to information.

Lady Luck was a fractal of indescribably intricacy colored in hues no earthly eye had ever seen. Each time Minhyun blinked she seemed to have become more complex. Her non-human nature was not disturbing, quite the opposite. He would have wanted to touch her, but was unsure if he even _could_ feel the texture of something that had no shape at all and every shape at once.

“You require my help,” she spoke directly into his mind, “I’m aware of that, but you must first understand the consequences.”

“W-what are you?” Minhyun asked, despite the urgency.

“I am a researcher. This is my outpost. If you must know, it is observation station 9H33m-6T we are in. I have not lied about my curiosity and concern for humankind. I have observed and gathered and pondered.”

Minhyun was breathless. He was glad he didn’t have to physically speak because his throat was too dry anyway. “What’s your name? Your real, actual name.”

She spoke her designation which consisted of fifteen syllables, two temperatures, one and a half colors and about five hundred shapes aligning to a twenty dimensional crystal. Well, he wouldn’t bother trying to pronounce _that_ , for sure.

Then she continued sending. “You must want to take on more power. I agree there is no other way to safe earth. But I want you to understand the consequence.”

“Which is?”

She paused. “You can never return. Not in your current form. Channeling even more energy through you – as much as you would require – is incompatible with a physical existence as you are enduring. You would destabilize and only stay coherent through continued use of the transmitted energy. The process is technically reversible but no compressive transfer between states is ever perfect.”

“And,” Minhyun sent carefully, “what are those imperfections?”

“A loss of parts of…of whatever makes you, you. Expanding your essence is one thing, breaking the additions away without tearing you apart is a challenge without equal. Memories, traits, understanding, habits, perhaps entire aspects of your life, deleted without replacement. You might end up different, you might end up an empty shell. Regardless of the chances I can and will not risk a reversal.”

“I have to do it anyway.”

Despite the alien anatomy, Minhyun was sure she had nodded or whatever the equivalent was. “I did not wish to deceive you but I admit there is no true choice. Farewell for now. I submit you into the care of someone who is better equipped to supervise the process. Wait here.”

 

***

 

Another fractal appeared in the room. It had more edges and less squiggles than Lady Luck. Its voice was less unambiguously female. Which is to say male. Maybe. How did they choose their voices anyway?

“Minhyun,” she or he or it said.

“Yes?”

“Do you consent to change form?”

“Yes?”

“Prepare to be decorporealized.”

 

***

 

There was a lot to see. A few septillion universes for example. They formed the Ring, although it was more of a tree, and lined up with other more or less similar structures. Above it – for some value of ‘above’ – was a greater connection, binding several undecillion Rings into an assembly. Layer after layer, with many dimensions more stretching in all directions – in new directions.

Universes with two different flows of time. Universes with no time. Universes which were constantly breeding offsprings. Universes which collapsed and reappeared over the course of milliseconds and such which did the same over a span so great they hadn’t collapsed once yet. Universes joined at the hip and universes in total undisturbed isolation.

Above and around and beneath and through was a meta-structure tying it all together in the only way it could be bound: The Hierarchy.

Minhyun was somewhere in there.

Orienting himself was tricky, he had to deal with more directions that he could count and he seemed to face the wrong way in one of them whenever he had positioned himself correctly in the others.

Then something or someone gently shoved him back in his own universe. It looked fairly familiar with its faint stars and its blue earth. This time he saw more of it, a network weaving through the continuum, much like his links. This was how matter and energy sang to him – sang to each other.

Eleven horrendous ships moved at warp speed.

 

***

 

It was a delicate maneuver. First he had to map out the flow of gravity within the entire solar system and keep it stable no matter what he did. If his actions launched the earth out of its orbit he would cause the end of humanity faster than the Void.

Then he linked himself to the only object able to stop the advancing vanguard. He took hold of each atom individually.

 _Minhyun grabbed the moon_.

The boy tore his chosen projectile out of orbit and threw it into the path of the warping ships. Eleven impacts shook the rock sphere and cracks extended deep enough to make the moon break into pieces.

He held it together with ease and pulled. The moon accelerated towards him, flew past and made its way to the rift.

Minhyun pressed the moon through the scar in space and accelerated it further. It crashed into the eldritch machinery beyond the universe, collapsing Void structures meant to secure the rift. He didn’t know what he ruined but he ruined it thoroughly.

Then the moon got stuck.

Minhyun pulled and his ammunition broke lose, tearing Void technology in huge chunks out of its interdimensional mounting. The ugly spiky things poked out of the moon’s surface as it returned to its proper place.

With the correct orbit and velocity reestablished, Minhyun ceased his control of the solar system’s gravity.

Lady Luck and her kind fell over the weakened Void from the other side. The battle was decided within seconds. The rift was retaken by the protectors of humankind and could be mended.

 

***

 

In what he had once called her throne room, Minhyun faced Lady Luck again.

“So I guess this is it,” he said. “Can I go say goodbye?”

She hesitated. “I cannot say if this would be advisable. You can have a message relayed. I fear however that direct contact would be cause for great grief on either side.”

“Then… what do I do now?”

“You may inherit my research station and watch over humanity until the day we can establish contact safely. After the spectacle culminating in the Void’s defeat I suspect questions will be asked. Perhaps the day of contact draws closer more quickly than we anticipated.”

“And you’re just waiting around? Till something or other?”

“That is what we do.”

“Why?”

Had she been in her physical form, Minhyun suspected she might have shrugged or sighed.

Lady Luck spoke gently. “When species gain sentience, one of the first things they do is look up – look at the sky, whatever appearance it may have in their universe. As cultures grow mature they gaze upon their stars anew and consider them destiny. Many make it there. Many more do not.”

Schematics of space crafts became visible, both plausible and implausible within the limits of physics Minhyun was familiar with.

“Traveling between planets is hard,” she continued. “Traveling between stars even more so. It is difficult and unrewarding. Of those races that attempt it, few go far. There is little reason to follow this path.”

Her fractals shifted in a way that made her point at herself. “We anticipated this. We looked upon the stars and did what only the rarest of species do. We questioned the stars. We questioned our destiny. And chose a different path.”

More schematics – of machines wholly different from space faring ones. “Traveling through space is hard,” she continued. “Traveling through the fabric, the layers, the structure…it is distinctly harder. But only initially so within one Ring, and much more rewarding. Along the way of our ascent we met others who had defied their destined path and the Federation was founded to mutual consummation.”

“I see,” Minhyun said. “Humanity must be given the chance to choose its own destiny. To ask the question _and_ answer it.”

“Then you understand?”

“Yes, but there’s one more thing I need to do. I have things on earth – people – I care about.”

“I fear I know what you will ask of me.” She sounded sad. That was absolutely not what he had hoped for.

“In the link – that supercharged link I had – I looked for Sujin. But she wasn’t there. My range didn’t extend to my sister. Can you tell me if she… What came of her?”

There was a quiet moment almost as if Lady Luck was taking a deep breath.

“I’m so sorry. You never had a sister.”

“Wha-“

“When I first interfered with your kind, when I found and imbued you, I was naïve and understood little of how your inner workings affect you. You were a wonderful person, but you needed a drive. I knew you would spend your life caring for those around you but never make use of your power. You were _too_ incorruptible. And in my ignorance I did so much more than needed.”

"But I have her photographs and..."

"Of my making."

“You- But…”

“I’m sorry, Minhyun. She is not real. She never was.”

“But I saw her! I saw her in the scape!”

Her voice was unbearably sad. “You were dreaming, Minhyun. You still had dreams. Many of the ones you entered were your own. Your subconscious mind let you see what you wanted to see.”

On top of the devastating feeling there was another cruel epiphany.

“He knew,” Minhyun whispered. “Junior knew. That’s why he was acting like that.”

“Junior knew from the moment I told him about your existence. He knew before you ever met, even if he was unable to understand it.”

How much time passed he couldn’t tell. He felt too much to sort it all out. Strangest of all, she had been right – now that he knew, his drive was gone, shifted, replaced.

“Alright,” he said coldly, “I’m ready. I have nothing binding me to earth anymore. Except for one thread. Can you tell Aron what happened? I can’t see him or I wouldn’t want to leave again.”

 

***

 

It was not long after that he was left alone for a moment, awaiting the return of the one who had terminated his corporeal existence.

The spiky fractal reappeared. “Minhyun.”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to be conceptualized?”

“…Yes.”

 

***

 

Minhyun linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and linked and…


	62. Question the Stars (4)

**Epilogue 1**

Ren sipped a cup of overpriced coffee, his shades keeping out the sun’s glaring reflection from the skyscraper on the other side of the park in which the boy waited. Why did they build such high buildings in New York? Oh well, he could use the time to clear his mind. Although he didn't know what to ponder first.

It had been subtle in the beginning but the changes kept piling up so drastically, it became impossible to ignore. Violence decreased worldwide, draughts ended despite all weather predictions, animals thought to be extinct showed up in forests around the globe, humanitarian projects succeeded beyond the most optimistic projections.

Something had happened that could end a war overnight, with everybody waking up convinced further fighting was pointless.

It was Minhyun’s doing but it would take a while before the United Nations had convinced everybody of this fact.

Junior had told them everything.

They had made him the General Secretary’s closest advisor. Everything ran past him and he gave the odds. Ren assumed Junior had known exactly what to say to get into his new position, using the rest of his fading overcharge to manipulate his way to where he could do the most good. These days he stayed out of the stock market.

The public didn’t know the exact extent of his powers. To them he must have seemed nearly omniscient.

It was the most impressive thing – or would have been, if Aron hadn’t kept turning dirt into gold and other such little tricks on the other side of the world.

For a while Ren had been worried the American was trying to carve out a kingdom for himself. But no, he only mixed up the game. Aron traveled the globe, leaving wealth and joy in his wake – the ultimate anti-catastrophe. Last Ren had heard, the boy had started taking flight lessons.

“Hello, Ren,” somebody said.

Ren turned to see against the sunlight. “Jason, hey. Good to see you.”

“Junior’s stuck in a meeting,” the assistant said. Yes, he was still Junior’s assistant. “He’s giving probabilities on where the last rebel troops are hiding so the army can move in without bloodshed.”

“What rebellion?”

“Something in the middle east. I dunno. It’s probably the last rebellion there is.”

“What army?”

“Didn’t you hear? Everything but the UN blue helmets has been disbanded.”

Ren huffed. “Weird how we’re getting it together as a planet.”

Jason avoided eye contact. “Have you thought about…you know?”

Of course Ren knew. The question was if he wanted to unveil himself and join the tiny elite of superheroes. He wouldn’t hide forever, not if it made it so difficult to be with Junior, but his ability felt scary, even to himself.

“Last I asked,” he said, “Junior predicted twenty percent likelihood that I’d be received well by the public. That’s massively greater than just a few month ago. I’ll give it some time.”

Jason only nodded. Then he helped Ren up and they wandered off towards the skyscraper Junior was stuck in.

 

***

 

**Epilogue 2**

Aron groaned under the flickering streetlights.

The hoard of children hadn’t stopped following him for three villages now. If anything, the kid-pile-up had grown in size. Wasn't is past their bed time? Where were their parents? Maybe he shouldn’t have turned that tree into lollipops. But he had really wanted one for himself. This region of Africa cooked way too spicy for his taste.

Over the weeks he had figured out escape techniques that hadn't failed him yet.

Aron turned dramatically towards the dozens of kids, waited until their anticipation shut them up and then raised his arms. There wasn’t much around so he had to tear out some of the dusty ground next to the dirt road. The chunk of earth hovered above the children, exploded and felt down on them as sliced fruit.

Once everybody was occupied catching as many vitamin rich edibles as their tiny hands could hold, Aron ran away. No lollipops this time. Never let it be said he didn’t care for their dental health.

The helicopter – _his_ helicopter – was right past the hill. He had a few more things scheduled for the next day and needed some sleep. Indeed, his schedule was packed. Meeting some king, visiting some school, opening some library, visiting some hospital, attending some banquet. The usual, really.

He should probably start remembering the names of people and places. And when was that upcoming Nuest reunion scheduled again? Maybe he just needed a permanent assistant. Would Junior share Jason?

The boy hopped into his aircraft and went through the checklist. This really was the easiest way to get around in this region where roads were rarely equipped to handle anything driving at more than walking pace.

As he rose higher and left the lights of the little villages behind, he saw the stars ahead. Not too well, because his head lights were on, but he knew they were there. Was Minhyun watching him? Well, yes, Minhyun was probably watching everyone and everything. But was he watching _him in particular_?

If what Lady Luck had said was true Minhyun had replaced her and was much more qualified to use the abilities luck gave him. That was really it – luck. The entity who had once been Aron’s boyfriend worked miracles at minute intervals, gently pushing humanity into the right one of all possible timelines.

It was amazing work and dwarfed Aron’s own efforts.

Still, he missed him.

 

***

 

**Epilogue 3**

Baekho ended the call. It had almost gone past a full hour. Now he was as up-to-date about things at home as he could possibly be. Well, the other home. The one just a few towns over.

His mother had insisted on the call, even though it wasn’t necessary anymore. She could visit whenever.

He was back in Korea and this time he had the job his mother thought he had. He wasn’t just anywhere in Korea, no, he was in his old city – in the very district he had been so eager to leave.

How odd it felt to him, remembering how much he had cared about only a handful of people. Now he had a whole neighborhood to supervise. If there were any problems, any arguments, any trouble makers, if somebody stole someone else’s Wi-Fi, Baekho was the mediator. Anyone in the district having reliable connections to begin with was also his doing. Since he had been elected the district's spokeperson in the city councel there was no neglect of basic infrastructure anymore.

Not an easy job but everybody loved him and that was all he needed. Well some people hated him but only temporarily – until they found another unprotected Wi-Fi to leach off.

Oh right, he had promised to feed Mrs. Choi’s cat for the duration of her cruise trip. Which was a small miracle all on its own. The old lady had spent fifty years mistrusting everyone around her never leaving the house.

Baekho put it on his list and continued with the more urgent task of carrying the buckets full of paint which would end up on the newly opened kindergarten. The kids were waiting.

Plus he had promised to call Junior. There was a superhero reunion coming up. Or maybe more of a we-killed-the-Shadow-and-survived-the-attack-by-the-Void anniversary. What time was it right now where Junior was? Where was Junior right now?

Whatever, he’d just write a text message. There were kids and a cat waiting.

 

***

 

**Epilogue 4**

“Nasa’s satellite launch tomorrow will be pushed back by a day due to weather – ninety-five percent. Don’t bother setting it up. I know, we all want to take a closer look at the stuff on the moon but they’d just be wasting their money.”

Junior wrapped up the day’s predictions. Which countries would sign the treaty? How much was the gold price about to change? Who was threatened by assassins? When was that overdue earthquake going to strike? Was the chocolate bar going to get stuck in the vending machine _again_?

Maybe the last one was of a more personal concern.

In any case, he was finally free to leave his obligations behind for the day, having covered the United Nations folks with probabilities that would leave their heads spinning for the rest of the day. Honestly, it had surprised even him to find out the Deep Sea Protection Act had a seventy-five percent chance of passing. He was still surprised by politicians being so…reasonable.

The boy – no, the young man – excused himself and made his way down into the lobby.

Junior raised the phone to his ear the moment Ren’s call arrived with absolute certainty, letting him pick up even before the first ringing. His other hand inserted a coin into the vending machine’s slot.

“Hello, Ren.”

“Ah! Don’t do that. For the millionth time: Let it ring at least once. This is too weird.”

“Are you waiting outside?” Junior asked, ignoring the criticism.

“Yes. There’s this new café right around the corner. We should try it. It just opened today I think.”

“It’s New York. People here are opening and closing new businesses like it’s a bad habit. I’ll grab an energy bar before I leave. Wish me luck. Ten percent chance it’ll get stuck again… aaaand it’s stuck. Great. Just great.”

Ren chuckled. “Minhyun can’t be everywhere at once, it seems.”

“Guess so. Hey, I thought about moving back to Korea. There’s nothing here I can’t do from afar, really. We’ll talk about it on the date.”

Ren was quiet for a moment. “Does Jason really need to be there?”

“Would you rather I take a bodyguard everywhere like they want me to?”

“Fine, just come outside.”

Junior stepped into the sunlight. Ren was waiting by the fountain in front of the entrance and smiled upon seeing his boyfriend.

There was a one hundred percent chance it would be a wonderful day.

 

**THE END**

 

 

 

 

 

First of all, my endless gratitude to you for sticking around. I began writing this as soon as their comeback was announced and thought I’d be done in time. Well, that didn’t happen – not even close. And the perfectionist I am never uploads until the story is fully written. Still, I’m happy you found your way here and enjoyed my writing. It was harder than I thought it would be but totally worth it.

My gratitude also goes to Nu’est of course. If they hadn’t kept coming out with new content after their initial comeback I’d have lost motivation halfway through. Unfortunatelly we Nu'est fans are a tiny, exclusive club. If only they had the fanbase they deserve.

This is the longest thing I’ve ever written. A little bit higher word count than ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’. About twice as long as my previous magnum opus, ‘Adore Me’ plus its four sequels. What a ride.

 

***

 

Here’s a quick Q&A if you wanna know how this all came about and other things.

 **Bias?** JR, who I now habitually call Junior in my mind. Oh well. I’m sorry I killed him like five times in this fic. I wasn’t even planning that. OTL. If I explained why he’s my bias I’d add another 10k words to this fic so let’s move on.

 **Bias wrecker?** Aron. I never really understood the concept of a bias wrecker before he showed up. I was happily staying in my lane, giving a little appreciation to the other boys equally when JR wasn’t in the picture and then this f*cker had to be fatally adorable (and speak English). I love him in a completely different way than JR. Weird how that works.

 **Why is JR called 'Junior'?** I kept missspelling his name as RJ and to be honest I don't think a name made up of two consonants rolls off the tongue too smoothly. But I wanted to stick to their stage names in some way.

 **Favorite Nu’est song?** Climax. I even like the super cheesy choreography. Don’t judge me. I also really like ‘Don’t wear revealing clothes’ or what the translated title is. Not even sorry.

 **Favorite MV?** What made me fall in love with them as a group was the ‘Not over you’ MV. Of course a lot of the feel of this fic was obviously inspired by ‘Sleep talking’. And I’m not sure the ‘Storybook’ video counts as an MV but I’ve watched it too often to leave it unmentioned. (Do I need to mention I like 'Overcome' or can that be assumed as default?)

 **How did you think of this story?** I got into Nu’est basically the moment they announced their comeback. Late to the party, I know, but it’s never _too_ late. Back then we didn’t know what their concept was going to be or else I’d have thought of something more fairy tale style. Anyway, I thought about which superpower would fit each boy and it all emerged naturally from there.

 **What’s the writing process?** I had about two or three sentences down for each arc and the rest I made up as I went along. To be honest, and this is a bit weird, I had all the arc titles generated by a random title generator. Then I kept the one’s I liked and made up plot around them.

 **Inspirations for this fic?** I’ve borrowed liberally from everywhere I found some idea I liked. Some concepts I’ve lifted wholesale. If you can guess one of my influences I’ll happily confirm, but I’m not going to state here what exactly they are so you don’t get spoiled if you intend to consume that particular piece of media in the future. There isn’t one particular book/cartoon/anime/fic etc. serving as main inspiration but I suppose genre conventions were my guideline.

 **What are your plans now?** Heck, if I knew. You’ll see me around, I guess. Though, if I'm honest my next fic likely won't be Nu'est related.

 **Can I do anything for you?** Yes. Comment. Leave me feedback. There’s nothing better you can give me.

 

_Good luck, and remember to question your stars ;)_


End file.
